


Within, Without

by yesmsmoran (elliedew)



Series: Trying [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Benny deserves more screen time, Cas changes too, Cas has blood issues, Dean comes back from Purgatory Changed, F/M, Gen, Hurt Dean, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Monsters think Dean would taste good with ketchup, Purgatory AU, Sick Dean, Temporary Character Death, Vessel!dean, Wings, hurt cas, my mind is a scary place, this is not pleasant for either of them
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-12
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-29 06:02:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1001853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliedew/pseuds/yesmsmoran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Continuation of Trying for those of you who wanted it. </p>
<p>Dean comes back from Purgatory changed... It's not necessarily a bad thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the Absence of Light

**Author's Note:**

> "Monsters will always exist. There's one inside each of us, but, an angel lives there too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other."  
> -Jacqueline Novogratz-

0-0-0

 

It would be better described in things that it’s not rather than things it IS, because Purgatory is a lot of things. It is always cold, but never cold enough to kill you. It’s always damp enough that your clothes never dry, but not wet enough for mud. It’s always dark, but never dark enough to hide the reflections of eyes watching you. 

Purgatory is not what Dean thought it would be. It is nothing like hell, while at the same time it is exactly like it. He did not feel powerless here all the time. He knew these things, knew how to fight them, and he did. 

Purgatory was not what Catholic lore made it out to be. It was not some dank dark prison for all the monsters they killed. It was not organized and upheld and carefully sectioned off. It was not constant. 

Dean sees it as a forest, depending on his mental state at the moment, it is either a dense copse of random trees like the backwoods of Kentucky, or a towering grove of sequoias. Sometimes it becomes the twisted gnarled trunks of Cyprus trees like something straight from the bayou. 

It is not a place for humans. 

Purgatory is not a ‘Place’ it is a living, breathing thing with thoughts and desires of its own. It's its own monster. The trees and soil break down and rebuild themselves like the Great PURGATORY Monster is changing clothes, like it’s a huge shifter going through different forms. You could spend a week sitting in the same spot and wake up to different surroundings every day. Then again sometimes you can walk for miles and the trees follow you, make you think you haven’t moved an inch. 

Dean likes to pretend he’s in Wonderland or that he’s fallen off the edge of the map—one of those old things like in pirate movies where they’ve drawn the sea serpent in the middle of the ocean and a dotted line that says ‘beyond here there be dragons’ or some shit. Only, yanno, there really are dragons in Purgatory. 

For the first week Dean didn’t really know what to do with himself. He’d run out of bullets in less than an hour, gave up and used his gun as a club until he’d lost it one night. His knife came in handy, not much here liked silver and any weapons he happened to find weren’t silver or iron or anything useful. There was always a monster out there to fight, always something trying to kill him, be it the beasts with the glowing eyes, or the very scenery—He had a minor panic attack when a tree… or what had looked like a tree, bent over and opened a wide gaping mouth amid its leaves and tried to eat him. Thrashed its branches against the earth trying to grab him and groaned like a lion in heat. 

It… it wasn’t fun that first week. He found very little to eat and what he did find made him sick. He wondered how Sam could stand the leafy greens so often when they made Dean’s guts feel like they were trying to fall out. He was always cold, always shivering and ached all over. The only virtue of the place was that he was the only person he had to worry about. He didn’t have to wonder where Sam was, or what innocent idiot was trying to be brave. There was just Dean and his weapons and the monsters trying to eat him. 

It was… was weirdly relieving. Freeing. Nobody to impress, nobody to save. Just violence for its own sake. That Dean could understand. Chaos in motion. No meaning behind it, no purpose. It just WAS. Simple, elegant, streamlined, pure in a way nothing he had ever encountered was. 

There were your average monsters. Wendigos, revenants, vampires, rougarous, changlings, selkies, skinwalkers, shape shifters, werewolves, ghouls, goblins… Then there were other things. Onyx Wasps, stone wyrms, gnomes out the wazoo, fucking trolls, mermaids, leprechauns, fairies, sirens, sylph. Dragons and fire wyrms, great horned toads and things Dean had never seen before. Things that when he got home and described them to Sam, his baby brother would cream himself over! Then… then there were the Old Gods. Things that defied imagination, slow and dark, lurking amid the ever changing scenery. Dean wouldn’t know until he’d escaped, but the Great Ones had been there for millennia. Had always been there, they were some of the original inhabitants of Purgatory. Monsters’ Great-Great Grandparents. 

The first week there Dean butted himself up against what he had, at the time, thought was a rock, bracketed himself in because it was easily defendable. It was Tuesday, that he won’t forget. It had been early enough that he’d still been able to keep track of the days. Back before his watch had been broken/lost/stolen. He’d hunched his back against it, decided to take a nap and woke up to an enormous bulk over his legs pinning him down. 

What a way to go, crushed to death by a giant centipede with a zillion watery black eyes and curly twisted horns the size of his arm. Its breath came in and out of a rent in its face and Dean—for an instant—thought its mouth looked like a deformed vagina or some shit. Hundreds of tiny two fingered arms wreathed the chasm and they twitched and gestured to him, ushering him forward. The eyes closest to its mouth were blue—Bright, dazzling jewel like blue and the breath that wheezed in and out of it smelled like death wrapped in hellfire. 

Dean vomited on himself and struggled under the thing’s bulk. Used his knife and cut off a dozen or more of its sharp car length legs before he could get from under it, ran away as fast as he could manage—but the damned thing ran after him, slithering snake like between the trees. The thing was fast, too fast and the only thing that kept him from being eaten by it was the fact something about five times the size of a t-rex lurched up out of the ground between him and the thing. It was like the very ground ruptured. Trees flew up and out and didn’t come back down as huge leathery wings expanded out and outoutout. It’s head was the size of a school bus wings each at least a mile long, tattered and frayed beyond the ability to catch wind and lift it into the air. It didn’t have arms but there were long claws on the wrist of its wings and its legs were giant, nothing but muscle and dirt crusted skin. It was like watching a sparrow attack a millipede, the Great Wyrm writhed, curled wildly and tried to wrap around the—Dean didn’t even know what it was, decided to call it Godzilla’s Mom and kept running. He didn’t stick around long enough to see who won. Didn’t really give a fuck thank you very much. 

Time doesn’t mean a damned thing in there. When the sun, or whatever it was that glowed in the sky, came out sometimes it would get so far up and—and stick. Just hover there for days and days on end, bake everything below it with cold fire. Sometimes the trees would just ignite like matchsticks under a magnifying lens and Dean would have to pull the collar of his shirt up over his mouth and nose and run blindly away from it. Other times the sun wouldn’t come out at all, days and days and days of nothing but darkness. 

He came across a clearing once, the earth was wildly disturbed, almost like a crater or an open pit mine. He sat on the rim of it for a while, just breathing and looked at the sky. There were no stars. No moon, but werewolves howled in the distance and things roared in beastly delight. There was a strange red glow coming from the forest directly in front of him. It never changed, always came from that same direction. The one constant in this place. You could see it in the daytime, like the clouds over Mordor all lit from below with fire. 

Sometimes Dean would wake up from a doze and think it had snowed, everything would be covered in a powdery layer of white, but when he touched it, it didn’t melt, just came apart black between his fingers. 

He never smelled smoke unless the trees around him were burning, not in those early days, but the ash fell, covered everything. Made tracking things easy, but also made it easier for you to be tracked. 

Sometimes it rained and the water would hiss and crackle against the ground and the monsters would roar and thrash and destroy themselves. It never burned Dean’s skin so he decided it must be holy water or something—thought that was funny as hell—and bottled up some when he could. It worked, so he wasn’t going to complain. 

Sometimes the trees would shed their leaves and grow back things that reminded him of hands, little claws that would reach and tear when the branches bent down.

Dean had had a fever dream once when he was twenty, before Sam went off to Stanford. He isn’t sure anymore what had caused it, a bullet wound or a cut—hell may have even been the flu, but Dean remembered dreaming that the bed was trying to swallow him, like something off Nightmare on Elm Street. Just open up in the middle like a giant mouth and gobble him up. 

This place was like that, only sometimes, the ground really did open up and try to eat him, some titanic monster having disguised itself as solid ground would sense him coming and just open its mouth and wait for him to fall in. 

He started carrying a stick after a while, would prod the ground in front of him before he stepped on it. If the stick sank into the dirt he’d walk around it. He was a human in Purgatory. He wasn’t like the monsters who could regenerate themselves after a while, after their bodies had rotted away they crawled out of the ground again elsewhere. If Dean died here he wouldn’t come back. He wouldn’t be able to get Cas out of here, he wouldn’t be able to get out of here… So he had to be careful.

He trapped a shifter a few days later. At first he hadn’t really been sure what he was looking at when he came out of hiding to find the thing dangling by its snared leg up in the tree he’d curled up under. Damned thing looked like half werewolf, half bat with a vicious mouthful of shark teeth. He talked to it for a little bit, demanded to know where the angel was. 

Thing looked right at him with weird silvery cat eyes and twisted bat nose said; “Which one?” It had laughed and laughed and laughed, hadn’t given him any more answers even when he’d threatened to cut off its balls. 

The silver killed it, but it was still the strangest thing he’d encountered. So far on his trip down the fucking rabbit hole, he’d only come across the normal things he was used to. Vampires galore, werewolves, changelings, but the deeper into the place he went… the weirder things got. The OLDER things

He came across a vampire later that week, untold miles away, who could fly. The thing was wearing the shape of a woman, some blonde—and between her wrists and ankles was a membrane of some sort, like a flying squirrel. She came at him from a tree, launched herself silently. In fact he wouldn’t have even known she was there until he’d hit the dirt with her fangs in his neck if the sun hadn’t decided to make a supersonic dash across the sky at that exact moment and in the sudden light her shadow had fallen across him. 

Jesus this place. 

He wrestled with her long enough to get his knife into her brain stem, let her lie there twitching and gurgling for a minute while he caught his breath, then finished the job. He’d never seen a vampire like this before. All weird skin and holy shit, did she have a fucking tail?

It was the weirdest thing. 

He didn’t notice when he stopped getting cold or why until almost two months later. He’d found some kind of berries growing by a bend in the river. They weren’t monster berries—he’d seen those before—these looked like currants. He’d had them once in rural Virginia, an old lady whose late husband had been trying to smother her in her sleep had made him cookies after the deed was done. They were soft and packed with juicy dried currants. He’d eaten so many of them he’d had to drive with his jeans unfastened. 

They tasted sweet. So sweet… Left his fingers stained blackred like old blood and made his lips tingle… 

It was only after he’d eaten a good two handfuls of them that the tingle in his lips became a tingle in his throat, a cold numbness of his tongue. 

Fuck… fuck… those weren’t currants. 

He tried to make himself cough them up, shoved stained sticky fingers down his throat and swallowed air and Jesus—oh, Jesus. He’d survived three months in purgatory only to be taken out by fucking poison berries.  
His stomach cramped, twisted and pulled so tight he couldn’t breathe, he drew his knees toward his chest and squeezed with his arms, tried not to make any noise because the sun—after about three days of sitting low in the ‘west’ was ratcheting back on itself toward the ‘east’ wobbling across the sky in weird zig-zag patterns and finally rocketing straight over his head to the ‘south’ and stopping with an edge above the horizon, just enough to bathe the place in bloody orange light. 

That was how Benny found him. He lingered on the edges of Dean’s vision in the twilight. A black silhouette on shifting silent feet. 

Dean was sick, shivering and barely conscious but when the vampire came at him he lashed out, found strength he didn’t know he had and fought him back… Collapsed on his face again and lie there panting watching the other circle. 

They spoke. Well, Dean spoke, warned and cursed and dry heaved. Benny just watched him for the longest time, intrigued. 

The river near by grew ice on its edges, Dean’s breath came out in silvery puffs… but he wasn’t cold. He passed it off as the sickness from the berries and curled around his stomach a little more tightly. 

Benny watched him until the sun decided to start rolling along the horizons like a ball in a bucket then lifted his voice loud enough for Dean to hear it and introduced himself. Said he’d heard there was a human in Purgatory and he thought he’d come and have a crack at him himself. “Everyone made you out to be some kind of holy terror. Some –some nightmare to monsters… Didn’t think I’d find him puking his guts up after eatin’ honeysuckle berries… I figured you’d be—I don’t know… Bigger.” 

“I got size right where it counts,” Dean snarled through his teeth. 

Benny laughed. 

The berries didn’t kill him. Benny didn’t either. They talked… Came to an—an Accord. 

Benny’d been there a while. Explained how things worked. Pointed out the differences in this place and reality. What he thought made it tick. 

“Its like you got a million years of evolution packed into one night… This place’ll get into you. It gives you what you think you want most.”

Dean thought that made sense. Monster Heaven and all… Why wouldn’t it give the monsters here what they wanted? What would make them better predators. 

“What about you?” Dean asked, locked eyes with the vampire and snuffed back the damp in his nose. “You changed?”

Benny just smiled. His eyes glittered. “In all the best ways.” 

Dean realized why he wasn’t cold not long after that. He’d curled against a tree trunk to rest while Benny kept watch and woke up with his coat and hair crusted in a thin layer of frost… But he felt no cooler than he had when the sun had been baking them for a week straight. 

He shook himself, paced back and forth with his fingers tangled in his hair. “How did you undo it? How did you UNDO IT!” He prayed, asked Cas what to do, how to fix it. “I don’t want to be a monster, Cas… I don’t—I don’t want to change into anything. I’m me, I just want to be me!” He wished and prayed and WANTED for Purgatory to take it away, to make him fully human again, to FIX IT… But the change had already been made. There was no undo button. 

“Well, at least you aren’t gonna freeze to death,” Benny said, shoulder against a tree, running a whet stone over one of the knives they’d picked up. “Look at the bright side—“

“What bright side! I’m—I’m turnin’ into something else. How the hell am I supposed to get out of here if I’m not human! If I belong here I can’t get out!”

It had been night for about a week now. Deep lightless but for the fiery glow to the ‘north’. Then suddenly the night was split by screaming and a blinding light slicing through the trees. The ground rocked and rumbled and SHOOK—

Benny grabbed him under the arms and launched them up into the biggest tree he could see, highHIGHHIGHHIGH above the ground. The tree swayed ominously, rolled and rocked in its roots like it may come unfixed from the ground. 

Dean sunk his fingernails into a nearby limb, snarled at the light and closed his eyes tightly. It burned—itched along his optic nerves. He wrapped himself around the tree limb and held on, teeth bared in defiance and fear of what was happening. 

Then everything stopped. Silence. Blackness. 

Nothing moved.

Benny was breathing heavily from below him, staring off in the direction the light had come. Said something in a laugh about that damned archangel finally tearing through—

Something in the distance cracked—echoed by another and another, closer and closer and closer—and the very earth beneath them began to unmake itself. 

Dean had never seen it happen before. It had happened around him, or he’d woken up half buried in dirt where the ground had seethed silently and shifted around him—tried to swallow him up. 

This time there was nothing silent about it. Purgatory roared like a wounded animal—maybe it was wounded and this was scar tissue forming on its hulking backside. 

The tree they were in snapped—shattered like glass at its base, shining quicksilver shards arching off into the night like fairy dust. It was as if gravity didn’t matter in that moment, the trees upended buried their leaves in the ground and sprouted branches from their roots, twisted and splintered, fell to ash or split into multiples. The ground heaved and changed itself. Mountains sprouting out of the ground and blasting off into the sky, throwing off dirt like a dog shaking off water. 

It was an awe inspiring sight. Terrifying and somehow beautiful. The sun peeked over the horizon to watch, blasted light over the landscape as the tree Dean and Benny were in launched itself skyward.

It was like seeing the earth created from lava. Like seeing the invisible finger of God prodding the primordial ooze and sparking life into it. He was watching a whole new world being born and it was… Dean couldn’t speak. Couldn’t really think, but in his head he called out; _“Cas… Cas you have to see this—“_

For a moment—just an instant Dean forgot himself. Forgot why he was here, what he was doing some twenty-five thousand feet in the air clinging to a tree branch in Purgatory. He forgot… Watched as the earth heaved and moved as if with breath, jagged icy peaks erupted from the ground like the ridges of some behemoth’s spine. Forests burst forth out of bare soil fully grown and the ground folded in on itself, blinked as if with monstrous eyes and filled with water. 

Dean quaked before the enormity of it, was momentarily weightless lifting free—in orbit of something MORE, something magnificent—

Benny’s mouth moved silently in his periphery, shaped like his name, hand out and reaching, fingers tearing at empty air some two feet below Dean’s hand.

He was gone—Gone baby, GONE! Major Tom to Ground Control and everything…

Benny and the tree were plummeting away beneath him, toppling and spinning and Dean saw the world so-so very far away from his feet and the sky so-so very close to his fingertips.

He very well may have pissed himself. 

Then the sun rolled under the horizon and everything went black. 

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0


	2. Sanctuary

0-0-0

Normal, civilian funerals are foreign. Sam didn’t really want to go—not because he hadn’t cared, it was obvious that he had, but it was more that he—he didn’t know what to do with his hands, yanno?

Her father’s name is Gene, he smiles and shakes Sam’s hand, welcomes him like he’s part of the family.

Dean hangs back, pulls at his tie and tries to keep his eyes averted. Sunglasses would have appeared too suspicious, Sam makes an excuse for him and clears the air, makes it OK for Dean’s eyes to reflect in the light when they shouldn’t. “Uh… lens replacements. Cataracts, congenital.”

Dean doesn’t ask, just remembers the excuse to use later. May come in handy the next time he wants to use the sympathy card to get laid.

Gene is quiet, sticks close to Sam like maybe that’ll bring his little girl back.

Sam isn’t sure why Dean brought him here, he hadn’t stuck around long enough for Jessica’s funeral, why now?

Dean explains it carefully, softly as they join the line of cars heading to the cemetery. “Jess died because of demons… Audrey died because of an accident. This—this is what you do when people die in bad, but human ways… Unless you wanna go hunt the drunken son-of-a-bitch. I mean, I’m all for it if that’s what you want—get me outta this monkey suit, but…” His voice fades off and Sam understands a little. This isn’t about hunting, or the lifestyle. This is about humanity. Dean didn’t bring him here to collect information, or scope out leads, he’d brought Sam here hoping for catharsis, hoping it would help.

“Thanks…”

He pulled at his tie again and shifted his shoulders like his shirt was itching his back. “Yeah, well, you owe me.”

Neither of them get drunk that night, despite the fact Sam wants to simply because the numbness of the alcohol feels like it might help. Dean says it’s not very sympathetic of them if they get drunk, considering. So instead they empty the hotel’s vending machines of coke and sit up all night watching slasher flics and not talking. And if while they’re not talking Sam doesn’t tell Dean about the way Audrey was able to make him laugh like nobody had since before Jess, nobody is the wiser.

They take a week off so to speak. Dean drives up to Vermont and lets Sam submerse himself in the kitschy little seaside shops and coffee houses while he eats his weight in seafood, pancakes and maple syrup and complains about a stomach ache.

Sam is amused but unsympathetic.

It doesn’t happen immediately, the return of normality, but it does happen.

They spend Halloween like they usually do, bickering and looking for a case. Dean cheats kids out of their candy playing poker and letting them look at his ‘monster eyes’.

Sam gets hooked on Pumpkin Spice Lattes again and ends up pulling buckshot out of Dean’s side after another group of Hunters catch wind that they’re in the area and attack them.

It’s not pretty. Dean’s left hip and lower side look like Swiss cheese but he doesn’t say a word. Keeps a rolled up washcloth soaked in whiskey clenched between his teeth and helps as much as he can with shaking hands.

It’s the first time Dean’s actually gotten hurt since he came back from Purgatory and Sam’s hands are shaking so bad Dean takes the pliers away from him and digs the last pieces of shot out himself. He’s pale, sweating profusely and his pupils are blown wide, reflecting back silver and blue and green, by the time they’ve got the shot out along with the bits of cloth carried through from his clothes. He doesn’t even bother to grumble when Sam pushes the towel he’s got covering his privates aside enough to tape down the gauze.

Dean doesn’t move until morning.

Three days later his skin is smooth but for fine little pink dots where the wounds were and he’s not even limping.

“Dude…” Sam peels back the stained gauze when Dean finally relents and lets him look. “What the hell?”

Dean just blinks at him and shrugs; “What? You got hurt in Purgatory you died… Had to do something.”

Sam touches one of the little scars and Dean smacks his hand away.

“Okay, weirdness level achieved. Back off,” And pulls his boxers back up as he goes for his bag.

Part of Sam wants to keep a file on his brother. Write down and record the differences. He jots down lists every so often on napkins but winds up throwing them away. Dean’s Differentness has lost some of its novelty over the past year. He’s just Dean, cranky and happy to drink your booze and eat your food and flirt with your women. There’s nothing weird about that. It’s the other stuff. It’s the way his wounds close to fast and leave marks too small to be normal. It’s the way sometimes, when he’s tired, his voice drops a little and his eyes take on a strange otherworldly keenness.

There are a few demons in Indiana that require their attention. A possessed nun in the Catholic school and a basement full of kindergarteners ready to be sacrificed.

After that there’s a dry spell. They take over an old boarded up farm house in Nebraska and they spend two weeks shoveling the parking lot of a little convenience store after it snows for free groceries and twenty bucks.

Sam spends what time they’re stuck inside out of the cold hunched over his computer and hoping the hotspot he launched from his phone doesn’t go out. He manages to find a series of weird deaths in Peoria Illinois. Sam said that the local paper had run a story of an explosion that had occurred on a farm just outside of town, that the fireball had lit up the sky and the resulting shockwave had broken out windows and set off alarms for miles. There had been pictures of the crater left in the farmer’s field. Authorities were claiming it had been a gas well explosion. A week later, on the same night, four men had died. 

The first was a school teacher with a reputation for being a hard-ass, he was found sitting on the toilet stone cold dead with a skin magazine in one hand and a burrito from Taco-Bell in the other.

The second vic was a policeman, strangled to death by a nine-foot python. It was the snake that made it weird. The guy hated snakes, so what was one doing in his apartment?

The third was a high-school student. A quiet kid from what everyone said, played trumpet in the school band. He was found in his car parked behind the football stadium with his dick in his hand, no sign of struggle, no sign of foul play. Eyes wide, mouth hanging open, face screwed up in terror. Dead as a fucking doornail.  

And the forth was a doctor at the local hospital. He had been found in literal pieces all over his bedroom, torn to shreds by what the coroner had said was some kind of badger or coyote or something. The body hadn’t been complete, pieces had been missing, presumed eaten by whatever animal had crawled in through the man’s open window.

Sam is happy to get out of the drafty old house, he’s sure he would have ended up with pneumonia if they’d had to stay another week, he envies Dean and his ability to withstand extreme temperatures without effect. Just a little bit.

For a week they can’t seem to find a link in the deaths. All of the vics are different ages, different walks of life.

The only connection seemed to be that the kid went to the same school as the hard-ass teacher, but that doesn’t account for the cop or the doctor. But whatever it was that had done it, or caused it, is long gone. There’s no clues, nothing…

Until Dean leans against the wall in the school teacher’s bathroom and notices something… a smudge on the window. He pulls Sam over with him and points, breathes out against the cold glass and the fog created by the heat of his breath is revealed.

 _‘For Eloise’_ The ‘o’ in her name is a little smiley face.

Revisiting each of the scenes Dean finds the same message rubbed into the glass of the policeman’s basement window, the band kid’s rear view mirror and in tall big letters across the doctor’s bedroom windows.

It’s Sam who finds her.

Eloise Fischer, seventeen… committed suicide three days before the deaths.

There is no EMF reading over her grave, no sign that she’s the culprit.

“What ghost would write about themselves in the third person?” Dean says rubbing his face.

Eloise’s mother is a small, timid looking graying woman with a scar on her upper lip and a lazy eye. She’s very well spoken and intelligent, talks softly, carefully and cries silently. There are pictures on the walls of her daughter. She was cute, plain, dark blonde hair and brown eyes. Rather unremarkable looking and maybe a little chubby.

Eloise’s mother speaks of how about two months ago her daughter had come home very late one night from band practice with bruises on her wrists. How quiet she’d been afterward… That she’d gone on long drives and had barely ate anything.

Dean asks if Eloise had made any new friends recently, or if she’d brought home any old books, perhaps with occult symbols on the covers.

The mother shakes her head and looks at him through narrowed eyes. “There was a man… He came here, the day of the funeral—I didn’t know him, he looked lost, sad. I thought maybe he was just one of those people who pass through, you know? Maybe he was just looking for someplace out of the cold…” Her head tilts a little more; “It was his eyes though… They caught the light, just like yours do.”

Dean’s jaws clench and he clears his throat; “He’d had lens replacements, you mean?”

She blinks slowly and leans back in her seat. “Yes… yes, that must be it.”

Sam wets his lips with the tip of his tongue; “Did you speak to this man?”

“Yes, for a moment. He touched my wrist and said he was sorry… then he left."

“Can you describe what he looked like?”

“He was taller, brown hair, rather attractive,” She blushed.

Dean motions to himself; “Tall like me, or like him?”

She shakes her head; “Just a little shorter than you,” She bites her lip, “He just looked so sad though… it was a funeral, so everyone was sad, but there—there was something MORE about him—you remind me of him… You—you feel so similar… I’m sorry,” She dabs at her eyes with a tissue and clenches her teeth together to keep quiet. “I know it sounds silly… You’ll have to forgive me for being so unobservant but… that’s really all I remember about him.”

Sam reassures her, tries to be gentle with it as he offers his condolences.

They interview a few more people who were at the funeral but none of them saw the man.

It’s a dead end.

No more deaths, no more leads, just what Sam can put together from the story they heard and the records they can dig up.

Eloise played piccolo. The band teacher told them that Eloise and Mark (the trumpet player) had been having ‘issues’ with one another for about a week. Eloise had stayed after with a few other students to put the instruments away after their rehearsal. She had left last and he had stayed back to tune the piano, had seen Mr. Johnston (The deceased teacher) leave around nine-thirty and then left himself around ten when the janitor let him out. There had not been anything suspicious when he’d left, he hadn’t heard anything.  

Sam sums it up in a few sentences. “Johnston catches Mark hurting her, yells at them, doesn’t even take the time to notice that she’s bleeding and leaves them there… Mark runs, Eloise goes to the hospital,” He shows Dean the medical records; “The doctor notes there was no evidence of damage. That the policeman didn’t view it as rape because Eloise admitted she and Mark had dated for a short time last year and had had sex before. Felicia, the nurse on duty that night said she overheard Officer Wilkes and the doctor talking, that Wilkes had said Eloise’s mother had made the same claims about her father before his death and the doctor replied that ‘there’s just no pleasing some women’.”

Dean stands and crosses his arms tightly, mutters curses under his breath while he paces. The lamp in the corner flickers and Sam hears a weird whine from the pocket of his jacket—the EMF detector is going off.

Sam looks at it, then back to his brother, calls his name but it doesn’t do any good.

Dean leaves for a while, probably goes to a bar and drinks himself stupid. Sam doesn’t wake when he comes back, doesn’t even realize Dean is back until he rolls over the next morning and finds his brother lying on top of the blankets still fully clothed.

There are no answers. No evidence at all that Eloise’s spirit has lingered, no reason. They don’t find anything on the strange man. No security video, nothing…

They move on. Unsatisfied and unnerved.

Dean stops the Impala at a deli in Chicago on Thanksgiving and they order what the owner is calling ‘Dinner on Bread’. Giant sandwiches with two thick slices of turkey topped in melted Swiss cheese, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing and cranberry sauce between two slices of sourdough. They spend the night in a dinky little motel with stomachs so full Sam feels suffocated lying on his back.

Two days later a group of Demons attack them in a gas station in Iowa, they manage to get away, but one of them, the leader it seemed, took a wide-armed swipe at Dean’s back as they fled and when Sam finally caught his breath in the car as they sped away he saw the woman shaped Demon standing there in the parking lot with a handful of something. He thought it was the back of Dean’s shirt but when he made his brother lean forward his clothes were intact.

“I thought she got you,” Sam pulls Dean’s shirt up and stares at his back. There are scars there he hasn’t paid attention to before, some of them he can identify, some he can’t. One, however looks almost—almost pretty against his brother’s skin. It’s faded, older than the others, a series of elongated checkmarks like claws, four of them. Small, barely the width of Sam’s splayed fingers. It reminds him of scarification he’s seen in magazines.

Dean lashes out and catches his brother quite hard in the stomach with the back of his hand; “Knock it off!” He yanks his shirt back down when Sam recoils to choke in breath and gives him a dirty look; “You’re goin all incesty on me and I don’t like it!”

“I am not.”

“That’s the second time you’ve tried to cop a feel… I know you’re bi-curious or whatever, Sam, but don’t do your experiments with me, alright? I’m not into that whole brother-on-brother thing,” He shivers visibly, shimmies his shoulders and wrinkles his nose; “If you’re into that call Becky and talk to her, leave me out of it.”

Sam tries to explain himself but Dean winds up turning the radio on high just to drown him out and singing along with Jethro Tull in an obscenely loud and off key voice.

Sam gives up and wrings a finger in his ear.

They make an unexpected detour north. Dean doesn't explain why, just smiles and takes out a hotel room just outside of Warsaw. He disappears and comes back with beer and pizza, lounges on his bed and laughs at crappy movies. Sam rolls his eyes and takes a few beers for himself.

Dean waits until his brother is asleep before he leaves, creeps out on silent feet to find the demons again. They seem to be following them and Dean manages to lure them away from the ritual they had been planning into a salt ring and exorcise them, takes back the bundle the female had wrapped in a plastic bag and hides it in the trunk.

Sam asks him, in the morning, where he’d disappeared to. Dean smiles… and lies.

0-0-0

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0-0-0


	3. Ye' Faithless Despair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorty this time.

0-0-0

0-0-0

“Come on, Brother, don’t quit on me now,” Benny’s voice seems far away. Everything seems far away.

He’s moving, where or how he doesn’t know, everything is—is weird, upside down. Benny’s feet are high above Dean’s head. Dean can see his arms dangling above him, his knuckles are split open and there are bruises on his wrists shaped like fingerprints.

Dean tastes blood on the back of his tongue.

“Come on—tell me about the movie. What happened to the princess? What about the robots?”

Dean tries to swallow but Benny’s shoulder is pressing hard into his gut and whatever he was swallowing comes right back up, he chokes on it—it feels thick and chunky so he spits it out, watches as it drops into Benny’s boot print and then it’s lost to the darkness around them.

The pain comes suddenly, like a kick to the crotch. It burns up his back and deep into his shoulders and his body locks up. His throat tightens and he wants to scream—wants to so badly, but it’s dark and there are EYES in the dark. He can see them shifting in the edges of his vision, hazy from the pain, but dark hunched shapes with red glints in their faces.

Movement stops, the hand on the small of Dean’s back shifts away and Benny’s easing him down, so careful, like Dean’s a fucking newborn. Oh, CHRIST his back hurts.

The memories are indistinct, shot through with vivid still images.

The red fire glow of the sun as mountains birthed themselves and the face of Purgatory was remade. Benny and the tree they’d sought sanctuary in falling—fallingfallingfalling away beneath him.

Blackness. The world in shades of gray and blue and black twisting wildly, without reason or rhyme as Dean fell. Toppled end over end flailing through the air. He’d screamed—shrieked more likely because he was going to die. He was falling from an impossible height and he was going to hit the trees, be impaled on their unnatural monstrous limbs, ripped to shreds and turned to jelly when he hit the ground. And that would be it. Dean didn’t know what would happen then. Would he survive? Would he just wake up and claw his way out of the dirt again, a monster himself? Would he go to heaven? Back to the Pit? Or would he just continue to fall for all eternity.

The ground and treetops rushed up at impossible speed and Dean threw his arms over his face in a futile attempt to protect himself and—

BOOM!

Something hit him hard from behind, wrapped around him and PULLED—

LIGHT! Branches and leaves slapping—tearing. Sudden world ending pain in his back—

And then darkness.

Cas.

Cas had caught him… But—but why then did he hurt so much?

Benny supported his head, made off key shushing noises and pressed the lip of a flask to Dean’s lips; “Go slow, don’t choke yourself.”

He couldn’t swallow but the water felt good in his mouth. Warm where he felt so cold.

Why… why was he cold? He hadn’t been cold in months. Maybe— maybe he would be OK? Maybe Purgatory was undoing whatever it had done?

There was something hovering over Benny’s shoulder. Something pale in the darkness with wide blue eyes that glinted like silver.

Dean’s eyes locked on it, held… and relaxed when the figure stepped closer and Dean could focus, could make out Castiel’s features in the gloom.

“Told you,” He turned his eyes to Benny and smiled broadly; “Told you he heard me.”

Benny looked at him with his mouth tense and his eyes somehow sad. “Yeah. Yeah, you told me alright.”

Castiel pressed forward cautiously and dropped into a crouch, fitted his palms to either side of Dean’s face and forced their eyes to meet.

The angel’s mouth moved slowly, carefully, over pronouncing words so Dean could understand them through the ringing in his ears.

“You’re OK… It’ll be over soon.”

Dean felt himself smile and he groped upward, caught the angel’s sleeve and held on.

That pain tore across his back again and Dean wobbled his head against the trunk of the tree Benny had leaned him into, looked down and saw his legs stretched out in front of him… But he couldn’t feel them. Couldn’t move them. His eyes tilted up to meet the blue ones above him and his voice came out in a rasp, wet and broken; “Cas— Cas, I—“ _I can’t feel my legs._

Cas’s brows pinched together and he nodded once, slowly; “I know.”

When Dean came to himself again he was lying on his stomach on Castiel’s coat on a sandbar by the river. Benny was standing between them and the trees. The sun was a vulture circling high in the sky and Cas had blood on his hands. It—it was weird being able to see his forearms and elbows but not his face, Dean had never really paid attention to his forearms before and oddly enough he wanted to touch them, feel the muscles flex under his skin. Dean thought it was funny but couldn’t laugh, just laid there like a gutted fish watching Benny watch them and every so often catching sight of Castiel’s torso or knees as he shifted into and out of view, crouched down and shuffling on his stained knees. Most of what he did Dean couldn’t feel, was just aware of the pressure, and below his mid-back not even that, It was like he just ended below that point.  But every so often Cas pushed IN and did something to the epicenter of pain in Dean’s back.

“’s it broken?” His voice sounded weak, pulled thin and dry. He was so thirsty and the world felt so cold.

“I don’t know.”

He could feel the angel’s hands, two unbelievably warm points on the small of his back. Castiel must be fucking straddling him to get into that position. Sitting there on his useless legs and passing his fingertips over Dean’s back looking for injury.

“Cas?”

“Yes, Dean?”

“Thank you… for—for catchin’ me.”

“Why wouldn’t I catch you?”

Dean snorted, coughed and stared at the flecks of blood that splattered onto the sleeve of the angel’s coat. He could hear a wet crackling in his chest when he drew air, a pressure near his spine low on the left side of his back, a solid, foreign and unforgiving point of immovability. Dean didn’t know what it was, honestly was a little scared to, “I’m… I’m hurt pretty bad?”

“Just lie still,” Castiel’s hands moved slowly, just skating lightly over flesh.

“Cas—“

“Don’t worry about it, relax.”

Dean focuses on Benny for a while, watches the vampire shifting uneasily on his feet. If Cas has blood on his hands Dean’s pretty sure he knows why Benny’s staying away.

“I don’t care for his proximity, Dean… Especially when I’m doing this.”

“’s okay… He’s cool.”

“He’s dangerous.”

“So am I,” He coughs again and his vision tunnels out. He can hear his own voice, heavily slurred, but he has no control over what it is he’s saying. “I’m changin’, Cas… I-I don’t know how to stop it… I don’t know how to undo it.”

Castiel’s hands stop below his shoulder blades and smooth out toward his sides. “You can’t,” His voice sounds sad.

“How—how do I keep…  from hap’nin again?”

“Remember,” He swallows audibly, “Don’t let yourself forget who you are, what you’re doing here and what you have to go home to,” He pauses, draws his hands back down the path they’d just taken—almost like a massage, but he paused every so often and Dean could feel warmth seep into his skin, could imagine the glow of the angel’s grace sinking in and fixing whatever was wrong. “There are Old Gods here, Dean, that are not tangible. Like fog, or smoke… Creatures that are nothing but ideas that take root in your mind and destroy you from the inside out. There are things that can seep into you from all sides, breathe doubt into your heart and… and eat your memories. You have to resist them or the changes will continue until there’s nothing left of you.”

The angel’s thumbs sweep in over his spine and light flashes behind Dean’s eyes. Silences the world and ends the pain.

When he opens them next he’s still lying on his stomach, but he’s not on the sand anymore. Benny’s crouching beside him. The sun has taken up residence in the far edge of the sky and actually seems to be acting like a normal sun for once.

Dean’s legs hurt.

Bad.

He isn’t sure he should be so happy about that, but he is.

“Where’s Cas?”

Benny flicked his fingers like a bird fluttering away and rolled his eyes skyward.

That night is long. Benny stays close, keeps Dean at his back, hidden in relative safety in the hollow of a Cyprus tree. This is Benny’s world here, he says low. He thinks this place looks familiar, he may have visited it once as a kid.

Eyes glint in the darkness. Every so often something comes forward and Benny has to kill it, but it’s surprisingly quiet, all the monsters seem more interested in something off to the ‘West’.

He can hear them roaring and screaming and hear the living trees moaning deep and low in a way that echoes through the earth.

The sun peeks over the horizon and decides to stay there. Doesn’t raise any further, doesn’t sink below, just decides to settle in for the long haul.

Dean is up and walking the next day. It’s slow and he has to lean on Benny’s shoulder a lot, but it’s better than being dead or paralyzed or dead and paralyzed. His shoulders ache, deep DEEP in his bones. It seems to come and go, fade out to nothing then ratchet up to the point he has to bow his head against Benny’s shoulder and fight to breathe.

He prays to Cas while they walk, even while he and Benny deal with a pack of mutated rugaru. 

Castiel doesn’t answer.

The pain in his shoulders doesn’t go away. It grows, wakes him up when he’s trying to rest, steals his breath, knocks him to his knees every so often. It’s like he’s got a knife lodged deep in there, or maybe like there are burns on his back and his shirt is slowly wearing through the damaged skin looking for muscle to grate against.

They find a lake. Dean’s lost track of time, doesn’t even know what time of day it is outside of this ‘Place’. He just walks until he gets too tired to stay on his feet. Fights until his arms don’t want to move. Carefully picks out the berries and other flora that won’t make him sick and eats when he can.

The lake is big, there are no ripples on it, no little waves from the wind. There is only mirror perfect stillness. It’s eerie. Like maybe something lurks just below the surface, watching… waiting.  

Dean drops to his knees by its edge and pulls his shirts off. There are specks of blood aligned with his shoulder blades and downward. He grits his teeth and bites back tears as he turns carefully and tries to get a look at his back in the reflection of the water.

The skin is red and inflamed in wide strips from the nape of his neck down to the waistband of his jeans. Little blisters dot the skin halfway down his back and a few of them have dark cores across his shoulders. Some of the darker ones have burst and are bleeding.

Benny steps close and whistles low under his breath but doesn’t say anything.

Dean asks if the lake is holy water, Benny dips the toe of his shoe in and shakes his head then takes out the flask he’d been giving Dean drinks from after the Earth Shake.

Dean unscrews the cap and takes a slow deep breath, grinds his teeth and dribbles it over his back across the blisters.

He sees the reflection of the reaction before he feels the pain. Like peroxide in an open wound. He bows forward and presses his face into the pile of his clothing, bites a hole in his t-shirt and tries not to scream. He sits up again slowly, shaking, shirt still caught between his teeth and repeats the process with his other side, pours more over the wounds until there is no reaction, then swallows down two great mouthfuls and breathes a sigh of relief when it doesn’t hurt in his throat.

He pulls his shirt over his head and breathes out a long low breath and they continue on.

0-0-0

 

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	4. Fuck You Charles Darwin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus Chapter because I've been sick.  
>  ~~Possessed by Satan ~~~~~~

0-0-0

The worst thing about winter, Sam’s realized, is that digging up graves when the ground is frozen harder than concrete is a long, tiring affair. Weirdly, he doesn’t think Ghosts should be allowed to wreak havoc on small town folks in the middle of winter. It’s damned near impossible to salt and burn the bastards when it takes you four hours to dig down the twenty inches past the frost line.

It’s even more inconvenient when you’ve got two men, both of whom are over six feet tall and not insubstantial by any means, crammed together into a seven foot by three foot space with shovels trying to violently hack at the frozen ground.

Sam’s covered in bruises that have nothing to do with the ghost throwing him around by the time they get to the coffin. Even in the cold the smell is overpowering and Sam pulls his scarf up over his nose while Dean does the honors.

After that it’s a quick retreat. Sam’s feet are so cold they’re numb and even Dean’s commenting that he’s feeling a little chilly under his jacket.

Sam shoves a handful of snow down the back of his shirt because it just doesn’t seem exactly fair he’s the only one freezing his nuts off.

Ten minutes and five miles later Dean’s got his jacket off and has a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his face. “Can we please turn the heat off now? I’m fuckin’ dying over here!”

Sam is still trying to massage warmth into his fingertips; “You suck, you know that? You really—really suck.”

Dean rolls his eyes and cracks a window.

Three days and one death omen later Dean spaces out in the middle of a gas station. He’s picking through packages of Bing-Bongs and Nutty-Buddy bars when his eyes sort of glaze over. Sam can’t see them behind his sunglasses, but he knows the expression. Dean’s face goes slack and his lips part just enough that you can see the sharp points of his teeth. He makes the same face when he sees a particularly good looking woman or discovers their case is not what he thought it was.

What startles Sam though, is the fact that Dean’s hand tightens on a two-pack of Twinkies and squeezes until it pops and yellow cake and cream filling go everywhere.

He doesn’t even come out of it when Sam smacks his cheeks a little and calls his name.

Maybe he’s having some kind of fit— It’s possible, maybe, Sam doesn’t really know and it scares him.

And then Dean’s head turns and Sam can feel those eyes on him through dark lenses. He doesn’t say anything, just marches up to the counter and tells the cashier in a low clear voice that he needs to use her restroom… now.

Sam hangs back, thinks maybe his brother’s just suddenly got the atomic shits and pays for the Twinkies Dean smashed, the gas and the rest of their snacks. He knocks on the bathroom door as he passes it and hears Dean call out; “Ocupado!”

Sam waits in the car for fifteen minutes before Dean comes out. He’s got his hands in his pockets and there’s sweat on his upper lip.

“Dean?”

He slides behind the wheel and shuts the door, is a little out of breath. “Yeah?”

“Did you just ditch me to pay for the food so you could get a blowjob in the bathroom?”

Dean snorts and turns to the road; “You should try it, kind of satisfying.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

0-0-0

Sam finds Ghouls in a town in Indiana. Grave robberies and corpse mutilations. The local online paper is rife with photos of tombs broken into and vaults split. One even shows sheriff deputies bending over a grave in the snow, the one crouched by the head stone has a hand over his mouth.

Dean isn’t so happy about it. “I hate ghouls…” He shivers and his hair stands on end, Sam can see it bristling like a cat’s. It’s a lot longer than he’s used to seeing it, untidy and starting to show a little curl behind his ears. Sam thinks it’s weird, especially since Dean hasn’t shaved in a few days and the hair on his jaws is growing as well. He’s starting to look a little like the wolf man in a floppy too big t-shirt and jeans with frayed knees.

Dean scratches at his chin and pads closer, bends over Sam’s shoulder and reads the article himself; “You’re crawling down any creepy grave tunnels, got that? I—No, I’m not crawling down any creepy grave tunnels.”

Dean ends up crawling down the frozen grave tunnels because he’s just that bad at rock-paper-scissors, but it’s a dead end. The Ghouls aren’t in their nest and there are so many tunnels in the graveyard, so many scattered bones and rotting pieces of corpse Dean can’t take the closed-in-underground feeling and crawls back out to sit against the Impala’s fender with his head bowed between his knees wheezing.

Sam takes pity on him and doesn’t make him go back in.

It is not easy to catch and kill a ghoul. They’re there for almost two weeks before they finally get a break which isn’t so much a break more as a splatter.

A deer leaps across the road and Dean barely misses it, but the truck coming in the opposite direction isn’t so lucky and Sam points with a wordless exclamation and wide eyes as the deer hits the grille of the truck, its neck snaps back hard over the hood and its body tumbles under the wheels.

The truck keeps on driving and Sam and Dean have fresh meat to use as bait.

Dean parks on the edge of the road and stares at the deer. It’s very dead, flattened a little with entrails seeping out a split in its belly, head turned around backward and its tongue out, legs all broken and twisted.

“Jesus H. Christ, that was nasty!” He turns and stares with his nose all wrinkled up and his sunglasses stripped off. “Did you see that, Sam? Fuckin’ thing _exploded!”_

Sam looks like maybe he wants to throw up, doesn’t turn around and shields his eyes when Dean climbs out and fetches a tarp from the trunk. He hums quietly and tries not to notice what his brother is doing. Tries to ignore his existence.

“Sam—SAM, give me a hand with this, there’s guts all over the place—“

Sam hits a high C and tilts his face toward the sky, swallows a few times and winds up emptying his stomach in the ditch when Dean comes over with blood on his hands and tells him to help with the duct tape at least cause he can’t get it started.

Sam doesn’t eat meat for almost a month. Dean thinks he’s being over dramatic.

Christmas… Christmas is terribly, terribly uneventful. They wind up in a hotel in Maryland, stranded in a snow storm, fresh off a poltergeist case with a bar across the street and a diner next door.

They spend two hours wrestling in the snow at midnight on Christmas Eve. Sam gets a handful of ice down the back of his pants, Dean gets some in his nose and a few other patrons think they’re drunk off their asses.

It—it’s fun. Peaceful, oddly somber.

They’re on their backs staring up at the sky, all orange from the snowfall and city lights watching flakes as big as silver dollars fall slowly downdowndown. They’re in a weird position, some sort of yin-yang where Dean’s splayed out on his back with his mouth open catching and snapping his sharp teeth at flakes that drift close enough and Sam’s about six inches above him, could turn his head and knock Dean in the eye with his chin if he wanted, instead he’s laughing quietly as Dean chomps at another snowflake like he’s an overexcited beagle.

Sam’s hands are wet in his gloves, his ass is wet too from sitting in the snow so long and it’s cold enough that he thinks he could probably sing soprano without trying. Dean—Dean’s radiating heat. Like a man shaped heater or something. Sam would normally think Dean had a fever or something but he doesn’t, that’s just how he is now, lying there in a drift in nothing but his jeans and jacket eating snowflakes and flashing his eyes at Sam every so often in amusement.

They don’t really ‘DO’ Christmas, but there are gifts in Sam’s bag balled in K-Mart bags held together with duct tape and he’s seen the packages covered in news print in Dean’s bag too but won’t admit it. It—it’s nice. Even the Impala, hidden under the tarp Dean covered her with when he heard there would be upwards of nineteen more inches of snow by morning, looks peaceful. Sleepy.

A church somewhere across town rings its bells and Sam turns his head to stare at the pine tree growing beside the shelter over the vending machines the hotel manager had decorated, watches the snow fly wildly in a breeze, catch on the colored lights and shimmer with rainbows.

“Hey, Dean?”

“Hnnn?” It comes out around his tongue.

“Wanna go get some eggnog?”

Dean pulls his tongue back into his mouth; “Fuck yes.”

Sam laughs again, watches as his brother flips over and climbs to his feet, shakes himself head to toe and the snow behind him flies around wildly. Sam covers his face to keep the powder from getting into his eyes and rolls to his hands and knees.

“Extra Nog, right?” Dean grins broadly with a few too many teeth.

“Always.”

0-0-0

They wind up staying until New Year’s Day simply because of the snow. Dean refuses to drive on wet slushy roads covered in salt because it would cause his Baby’s undercarriage to rust, so they hang around until the highway is clear and dry then make a break for warmer climes.

There’s a skunk-ape near Orlando that—after they corner the damned thing—is easily coerced into returning to the swamp and a squirrel running amuck with a cursed wristwatch stuck around its neck.

Apparently anyone that comments on it, unless they’re the one wearing the watch, hears it ticking and if the watch stops they all die. Go figure.

Too bad the local newspaper had published a photo and story about the unfortunate squirrel and now everyone in the city could hear the phantom ticking.

It is ridiculously hard to catch the damned squirrel and when they do it bites Sam while he’s trying to get the watch off of it.

They burn the watch and the phantom ticking stops… nobody dies. Then Sam spends the rest of the night in the emergency room getting rabies shots.

Dean thinks it’s funny. Sam puts anti-diarrhea pills in Dean’s dinner and feels darkly pleased with himself when his brother is horribly constipated for the next five days.

Sam finds it weirdly satisfying causing an uproar in his brother’s bowels. It’s become difficult, with Dean’s senses in overdrive like this, to find a really good prank to get him with that isn’t just something petty like gluing him to things, or gluing things to him, or tuning the radio in the car to some pop or country station and turning the volume up so when Dean starts the car he gets a nasty surprise. Sam means business when he goes after Dean’s bowels because Dean has come to appreciate quality time between a man and a toilet substantially more since returning from Purgatory and taking that away from him is satisfying beyond belief, especially when Dean’s being a prick.

Sam knows something isn’t exactly ‘alright’ with Dean two days later. His brother’s skin is pale, sallow under his sunglasses and when they stop early and Sam pays for a hotel room, Dean eases himself onto his bed on his side, arms around his middle and doesn’t move when Sam calls his name about half an hour later, just lays there with glazed, dilated eyes and parted pale lips.

Whatever it is doesn’t last long. He spikes a fever sometime after midnight, wakes Sam up calling his name in a thin crackling voice. Sam spends three hours fetching cold cloths from the bathroom and ice from the machine in the hall. Dean spends it on his back burning somewhere over one-oh-six but shivering like he’s been dipped in ice water. His lips move but there isn’t any sound, Sam isn’t even sure what his brother is mumbling is English. He promises himself, after the third garbage bag of ice has melted against Dean’s chest and there still isn’t much of a change that he’s going to call an ambulance. He’s reaching for the phone when his Dean’s hand catches his wrist, it’s a loose grip but Sam can’t break it, can’t move. When he looks into Dean’s eyes he isn’t sure it’s his brother looking out of them.

“It’s OK… It’s over now,” His eyes flutter closed and his hand drops to his side.

By morning Dean’s temperature is normal again and aside from a general weakness in his muscles and an ache in his joints Dean’s fine. He blinks stupidly at the world and drinks the water Sam hands him without protest, nibbles at some crackers and swallows the stupid froufrou tea Sam forces upon him.

He seems dazed and the light hurts his eyes more than usual, but the fever doesn’t come back.

“What was that?” Sam breaks the silence in the car late that afternoon. He’s driving while Dean’s got the passenger window down and his sunglasses on. He’s wearing a t-shirt and it’s only about fifty degrees outside. The wind feels absolutely freezing.

“What was what?”

“Back at the hotel.”

He shrugs; “Got sick. It happens.”

“When you get sick you’re down for a couple days and yeah, you’ve had a fever before but that was—Jesus, Dean, your brain could have melted.”

He snorts, shrugs one shoulder and tilts his face into the wind with a crooked little smirk; “You’re complaining because I got better fast?”

“I’m complaining that your temperature was very near pyroclastic for most of the night and now you’re perfectly fine.”

“Would you rather me be on my back in a hospital bed?”

“Well, no, but—“

“Then stop complaining.”

Dean finds a shape shifter in Pensacola that’s nabbing women off the street and strangling them to death. Video surveillance shows the guys eyes flaring white, as he drags his third blonde off into an alleyway. Dean can guess what comes next, the shifter takes her form, leaves her body naked in a dumpster and empties her bank accounts.

It’s petty and ugly and Dean hates it.

The shifter’s last victim was a single mom named Sherry. Her four-year-old daughter is autistic and according to the doctors hasn’t spoken a word since. Just sits there staring out the window or drawing neat precise circles in varying colors—

The real kicker is when they go take a look at Sherry’s body in the morgue… and discover the body in the bag isn’t Sherry at all, but the shifter. There’s a stab wound, right in the chest. Medical Examiner says that if they hadn’t got video of the guy nabbing her they wouldn’t have thought it was related because the cause of death didn’t fit his MO. The murder weapon was a silver nail file. The police took it for fingerprints, but the only ones on it were Sherry’s.

It’s not their case anymore, but Dean can’t drop it. Keeps thinking of that poor little girl whose mother had abandoned her and he wants answers. Sam helps, he doesn’t know why, but he helps.

They find Sherry in Pittsburgh… with her new boyfriend Shawn.

Dean and Sam leave her with her daughter’s drawings and photo and her boyfriend’s horrified, shockedANGRY shouting.

It doesn’t feel like a victory. If anything it makes Sam feel worse for that little girl.

The next day Sam wakes up with a headache, by noon he’s feverish and huddled against the car door while Dean makes an emergency run into a drug store for anti-nausea medication and fever reducers. He wants to stop, says Sam isn’t going to get better in the car, but Sam shakes his head and taps the papers he’d printed off at the library in Pittsburgh.

Apparently Dean’s fever hadn’t been anything ‘Weird’ but legitimately seemed to be a virus of some sort and now Sam’s got it. He spends the next forty-eight hours in the back seat of the Impala sick as a dog because he refuses to let Dean stop and book a hotel room. They absolutely had to make it to Washington before Friday and couldn’t afford to stop.

“You’re sick, Sam. You’re not gonna do anybody any good when you’re sick!”

“I’m fine!”

Dean snorts; “Yeah, tell me that when you’re not shivering and sweating all over my upholstery.”

Washington has an infestation of witches. There are thirty of them in a little town South-East of Olympia. Most of them are just your average idiots looking to get their Dark-Side on. Only about five of them actually know what they’re doing, the others think that it’s only a special ritual and they were needed to witness it. Most of them clear out damned fast when Sam mentions demons. But, ten of them… Ten of them are already power hungry, add them to the three crones running the show and you had one hell of a coven.  

Sam calls for backup. There aren’t many hunters left who want anything to do with them, but the few who agree to help earn their brownie points.

The Coven is meeting in the house of the town’s doctor, one of the ten who are so keen on performing the ritual. They’ve got some pretty dark artifacts for this. A weird silvery white knife with a hilt made of some kind of bone—Sam think’s it’s a human femur— and a black bowl carved from volcanic glass with symbols etched carefully around its rim, inside and out. Dean made a comment about witches and their Tupperware parties and Sam rolled his eyes.

Sam still felt like absolute shit, but this was bad business with a thirteen member coven and they couldn’t afford to let this slide.

Three other hunters came to help. An older man with a bald head and a bum ticker named Yosef who says he might as well go out with a bang instead of wasting away on his daughter’s couch. A woman named Tallulah with short wiry hair and a wicked smile, she’s covered in tattoos warding this and guarding against that and knows her way around a spell book a little too easily for Sam’s comfort, but whatever works, yanno. Then there’s a kid who, on the phone, had pretended to be his father— that had apparently been mauled to death by a fucking Vargr three months before— and come packing table salt and his deceased mother’s rosary with his inhaler in the front pocket of his shirt. Kid called himself Buck and Sam was sure he had more hair on his knuckles than this kid had on his balls. He tried to send the boy packing but Buck carried a mean left hook and was good with a rifle at distance, so Sam set him up in the back of Yosef’s truck with its wards and the hex-bags Tallulah put together to keep the boy safe, gave him a coffee can full of shells for his infield and said to try and keep the friendly fire to a minimum.

Sam has never liked fighting witches. They’re humans after all, most of the time.  Three of these, however, are not. The Crones in charge are black witches. Probably older than that douchebag Patrick who aged Dean half to death a few years back, or the feuding lovers they barely escaped from. When they realize their ritual is thwarted they fall back, start running toward the river path like they have a chance of getting away.

Dean snarls his brother’s name and leaps after them—vaults over their destroyed altar and starts running a little too fast for normal.

The spell had been complicated. They’d needed the blood of thirty believers loosed by their weird knife and caught in their magic bowl fermented for nineteen days with some pretty rare herbs. The eyes of a non-believer burned to ash and mixed into the blood to form an ink, the skull of a murdered man onto which symbols were to be painted and the tongue of a virgin cut out during her deflowering.

Tallulah said the spell would raise an Old God, the ‘Burning One’ as the text roughly translated to. It would spread throughout the land and cause a plague like fever that burned out the souls of everyone it infected. She explained it as a virus that didn’t attack your body but your very spirit, left you empty and ready for demons to possess you; ‘Slip in all slick and easy like. As ya’ do.’

The witches had their fermented blood, had their skull but didn’t have their tongue—their virgin was wrapped in a sheet, safe and unharmed in Yosef’s arms as he lead her away. The doctor, her would be rapist, dead.

Tallulah finished the last witch with what reminded Sam of some sort of farming implement and everything was quiet. Sam went to the window and used his flashlight to signal to Buck that it was OK to stand down—and then he heard the gunshots.

Onetwothree—forfive—and a scream… A rough, masculine scream that hadn’t come from any of the three witches Dean had taken off after.

Sam’s heart leapt into his throat and he ran.

It was snowing again—hard. Sam could barely see his brother’s boot prints on the path, but he followed the shallow indentations anyway.

Sam could see shapes near the water, a boat of some kind was tethered to the dock—The crones’ means of escape no doubt— Two of the three witches were lying motionless in the snow in the path, but the third… The third was screaming—

Dean was standing on the dock at the water’s edge with one hand on the last remaining witch’s cheek, she was on her knees in front of him, hands tangled in his clothes and light was burning out from inside her head, through her eyes and nose and mouth and her fucking ears—

Sam could only see Dean’s silhouette against the brightness and he lifted a hand to shield his eyes from it, felt his mouth fall open in complete shock because this—What was **THIS!**

The light stuttered and went out and the witch dropped over, smoking and didn’t move again.

Sam stared—horrified and Dean turned to gaze over his shoulder, but what looked out of his brother’s eyes wasn’t Dean.

“There…” His voice was hushed, low and even, his eyes were losing focus and it was only then Sam saw the blood, saw the knife sticking out of Dean’s back, just above and to the inside of his right shoulder blade. “It’s done.”

And Dean’s eyes rolled up to the whites, his knees unhinged and he toppled sideways off the walkway into the icy water with a great splash.

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	5. By The Light of The Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Contains non-explicit* Destiel, mentions of blood and such. You've been warned.

0-0-0

 

0-0-0

Dean is going crazy.

 

The itch—BURN ACHE—in his back has become intolerable. He is a wild animal snarling and feverish and clawing at the ground, hands bound above his head to the titanic root of a tree, bare chest pressed into the stained satin of the liner in Benny’s coat, the chill of the earth seeping up into him like a balm. He’s burning alive and nobody will put him out of his misery!

 

“Easy, Brother. I got it,” Benny’s voice is all jagged edges to Dean’s mind, claws and teeth and Dean bares his own, longer—sharper than they had been weeks ago because the pain has turned him feral. Has made him into something murderous in its wake.

 

Benny’s on top of him, sitting on the backs of his knees to hold him down with one big hand on the small of his back, the other peeling strips of skin away from the oozing pustules spreading from between his shoulder blades down.

 

He’s swollen, feels like his muscles have locked and strained across his back, feels like there are maggots writhing under his skin but he can’t articulate it, merely snarls and grinds his teeth into the belt Benny had tied around his head, lodged into his mouth and tightened.

 

“It’s OK, we’ll figure this out,” Benny rinsed the wounds again with holy water. There was no bubbling this time, hadn’t been in a few days, but one could never be too careful. The strip of Dean’s shirt he’s using as a rag is black red with gore, streaked every so often with bits of puss and tissue.

 

Dean feels raw, turns his face away from the fire because it’s too hot—it’s just too goddamn hot!

 

Benny uses his knife, a thin silver thing barely bigger than a pocket knife, slides the blade in and hesitates, mutters something in French under his breath and pulls the knife back, picks another spot and eases it in, makes a little cut and thumbs at it like he’s trying to work out a splinter or something.

 

“Dean—DEAN,” He raps his knuckles roughly against the top of Dean’s head and holds what he’s found between forefinger and thumb, silhouetted against the firelight. When Dean turns his head and looks he isn’t sure exactly what he’s seeing. Had expected maggots or something, not THAT. Definitely not THAT! He goes still, whimpers in something close to terror and stares at Benny from the corner of his eye, flexes his hands open and closed and drags in quick uneven breaths through his nose.

 

Benny cuts and cuts and cuts, Dean feels like his back is ruined, nothing left but hamburger over bone and he isn’t sure if he faints or falls asleep but when he wakes up his hands are unbound and his mouth feels sore where the leather of his belt had bit into the edges of his lips and prevented his jaws closing. His back still hurts but it is significantly less troublesome than it had been the night before.

 

Benny’s sitting across from him, on the far side of the blackened little crater where their fire had been. He’s staring, has one hand pressed over his mouth like he’s keeping something in there. When he notices Dean’s eyes are open he rubs his mouth and shifts his hand away, presses it into his cheek and speaks softly; “Have to admit… Long as I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anything like that.”

 

Dean turns his head away and tries to choke back the sobs.

 

It itches more than it hurts now. Aches a little like a healing bone will ache or like his joints had between fifteen and seventeen when he’d literally grown twenty inches in as many months.

 

Growth pains. Fucking hell.

 

His clothes irritate it so he ties his shirt around his waist, gives up on wearing it unless it’s dark and he needs the extra layers as some kind of psychological armor. Without his shirt he doesn’t feel safe, becomes more defensive, more like a caged animal ready to fight.

He catches Benny looking at him. Catches him LOOKING and snaps before he can stop himself. Bares his teeth and feels the hair on his head and the STUFF on his back bristling up defensively.

 

Benny backs off the first few times, then he laughs and calls him a puffed up sparrow and Dean threatens to chop off his head, needing him or not.

 

It’s only when Dean catches the shape of his shadow that the reality of it sets in. Something in his head taps out and Benny has to wrestle him to the ground and take away his weapon to keep him from cutting them off.

 

He begs, face pressed to the dirt, scratching and clawing at it, eyes wide and pleading. “You gotta—you gotta cut it off—oh, fuck! I—I can’t stay like this! Please, Benny, please! I can’t go home like this!” He’s crying. Uncontrollably, loudly. He’s reached some kind of pinnacle. This is his end of the road. He’s survived six months in purgatory and THIS was going to end him. Something he’d had no control over, something caused by a fleeting thought Dean may not have even been aware of. THIS was going to be the End All for Dean Winchester.

 

Benny felt a twinge, uncomfortable, compassion. “Okay… Okay.”

 

Dean cries the whole time, but doesn’t make a sound louder than fighting for air. When it’s over there’s more blood than it seems possible for a person to lose and survive, but by morning the wounds are healed over and a week later the ITCHINGBURNINGPAIN starts again.

 

Dean cracks. Butts himself up in the hollow of a Cyprus and sits there with his nails dug into his shoulders laughing with piles of bloody down all around him and tears coursing down his face, snot dripping from his nose.

 

Castiel appears out of nowhere, wedges himself in the hole as well and pulls Dean to his chest, wraps his arms around his neck and holds on tightly until Dean’s break leaves him deeply unconscious and the angel can get a look at what’s happened.

 

When Dean wakes up he asks Castiel if they’ll grow back if he cuts them off again. Castiel’s shoulders sag and his shining eyes turn away.

 

Dean doesn’t talk for a week. He asks Castiel one night, his head on the angel’s thigh, knees drawn to his chest, if they’d grow back if Castiel burned them away with his grace.

 

“Yes.”

 

He doesn’t speak again for close to two weeks and even then there’s a resignation to his features. A sadness –regret.

 

Castiel leaves again the third week. Dean doesn’t know where he went, prays every night but it’s different. He asks that when Castiel gets out he doesn’t tell Sam what happened.

 

“Just tell him I got eaten by Leviathan… Don’t tell him about—about this.”

 

Castiel hides and tries not to react, but finds moisture dripping onto his hands where they rest in his lap, finds a twinge of regret as he tilts his face up and lets the URGE take over.

 

He doesn’t see Dean again for three months. Not because he doesn’t hear him, on some level he does, but because he can’t hear himself. The Changes have stolen him, have made something ELSE of him, have begun to eat away at his grace—INFECT him.

 

Please—PLEASE—He focuses, comes back to himself kneeling in a copse of trees and underbrush surrounded by bodies with blood on his chin and hands and a taste like rot in the back of his throat.

 

He stares at his hands—what used to be hands but are now thin, elongated and tipped with claws. Wraps his arms around his stomach and finds his vessel thin—stretched.

 

He PUSHES OUT with his grace, burns as much of the taint away as he can but knows that it will eventually grow back. It always grows back.

 

Dean is praying to him. Says that they’re close, as long as there isn’t another Shift they could be at the doorway in a week. Please, please, Cas, come back. I can’t leave without you. I can’t leave without you…

 

Castiel feels himself shaking, looks up into the blackened sky, red at the edges from the Old God’s presence—and sobs aloud.

 

Humans can pass through the portal… But is Castiel’s vessel that any longer? His hands, nails still dark and slightly claw like slide under his coat, find the lattice work of scars across his back and feels it like a weight in his stomach.

 

He goes to Dean, intent on telling him that he can’t follow—and loses his words at the sight of him.

 

Dean is alone at the moment. Benny is some hundred yards back or so. Dean is sitting on the side of a gigantic felled tree. He is changed by this place in ways that cannot ever be altered, but there is something fundamentally pure about him that the Darkness within Castiel craves wishes to DEVOUR.

 

The ‘sun’ had shone a lot recently. It’s light lingers in the tone of Dean’s skin and the bleached look of his hair. Castiel had heard Benny call Dean ‘Sparrow’ once but that isn’t what Castiel sees, he sees something dangerous and beautiful and there is an ACHE in his chest that has nothing to do with the HUNGER of the Dark.

 

Castiel lies to him. Says he will stay, lets Dean lean against his side and sleep with his head in his lap. Castiel yearns for him in a way that is more and somehow less than spiritual.

 

Dean smiles and it’s such a smile. Such a smile Castiel forgets for a moment what he is hiding.

 

Dean can’t really lie comfortably on his back but Castiel’s coat bundled beneath his shoulders helps and Castiel pins his hands to the earth amid a blanket of tawny feathers and there is a desperate dance of flesh. Heat as Dean hitches his knees up clings with the bends of his legs since his arms are pinned as they slide together. Find a rhythm of friction and misplaced clothing.

 

Benny makes a comment the next day—“The sun has come out to shine on your asses—so you better put your pants back on if you don’t wanna burn.”

 

Dean grumbles and doesn’t stay close to Castiel, keeps his head down and his eyes averted. He is tense and embarrassed and sneaks sidelong, pink cheeked Glances at Castiel and makes three separate excuses to touch him that are more deliberate than he hopes they appear.

 

The days pass and they grow closer to the exit and every night Dean seems to grow more desperate for something other than the dry grind of their bodies together. He wants to touch but Castiel denies him. Keeps his hands down because he’s clinging on to the desperate hope that this will be enough. That if Dean has this it won’t hurt as much when he realizes Castiel can’t follow him home this time.

 

He realizes the error only after it’s too late. Only when he sees that soft, fragile look in Dean’s shining eyes as he stares up from Castiel’s lap.

 

He waits until Dean is sleeping and creeps away. Fights back the URGE and finds himself face to face with a vampire… With Benny wielding his club.

 

Benny is not a man to beat around the bush as it were, actual bush beating aside. He meets Castiel’s eyes and speaks slowly; “When did it get you?”

 

There is no use lying about it, but Castiel does anyway. He’s spent too long in the company of Winchesters for a lie not to be his first defense. “I don’t understand.”

 

Benny snorts, it is by no means amused; “The werewolf… Angel power doesn’t do you much good down here… That body’s still human—or was… The angel might still be an angel, but the vessel? That’s a completely different matter. And cut off from heaven like you are right now I’d say you’re pretty damn close to getting’ swallowed by It.”

 

Castiel feels it building and struggles to keep it pushed down; “You can’t tell him—“

 

Benny shakes his head; “Not how this works… My job is keepin’ him alive and right now all It wants you to do is rip into him… Sooner or later It’s gonna win and you know it.”

 

Castiel eyed the club in Benny’s hand thoughtfully, felt his skin crawling; “I will not hurt him!”

 

“YOU might not… but IT will,” He flicks his tongue over the tips of his fangs and lets them retract; “You got a choice to make… Either you tell him, or I will.”

 

“You haven’t hurt him.”

 

“No, but I got a reason not to. IT don’t. Right now we’re not talkin’ about one thing, we’re talkin’ about two. YOU and IT… One of ya’s gotta go.”

 

“If I leave my vessel the entirety of the Leviathan will rain down on us.”

 

“Then take another vessel,” The voice startles them both. Dean apparently, has become lighter on his feet than even Benny. He has become silent and right now there is a look on his face that is both fierce and terrified.

 

Castiel feels his chest ache, feels a strange human twinge of sadness. "I can't."

 

Dean steps forward and he’s shaking, visibly shaking; “Do you need me to say it?”

 

“Dean, don’t,” He can’t. Remembers how hard Dean had fought to keep Michael out and now here he was offering himself freely. “Don’t ask me to do this—“

 

And there it is, naked and helpless in his gaze even if he’s never said the words it’s there and Castiel feels it jolt through his chest like a knife, looks to Benny as if begging the vampire to just end him.

 

“You can’t sleep heavy in this place. I learned that quick… I-I want to do this. It’ll be OK, you’ll be able to leave if you’re in here too—“

 

And then there is screeching, like bombs dropping from great height, a roaring ripping noise and the next second there are craters in the earth filled with writhing black ooze that forms itself up into human shapes.

 

Five of them.

 

Castiel turns to lead them away, yells for Dean to run and it looks like it’s working… Until Castiel glances behind himself and only sees two of them.

 

No. Please—please no!

It’s so easy to let it slip… To just—just let it all fade away. He tears into them with claws and teeth and the Hungry DARKNESS within him. Rips them to shreds and poisons them with stolen grace. Castiel is no longer himself, but a creature of hunger and fangs and torn skin. There are no hearts in Leviathan so he shreds them scatters the pieces and runs.

 

He finds Benny leaning against a tree, beheaded Big Mouths around him with Dean held to his chest.

 

Castiel hears a beating heart. Weak and stuttering, slowing from blood loss—sees a tear in the side of Dean’s throat partially hidden under Benny’s hand as he tries to staunch the flow.

 

Castiel snarls, feels the URGE growing and sees the descent of Benny’s fangs, the way he pulls Dean closer to himself protectively as the beast Castiel has become stalks forward.

 

Dean’s eyes are closed and there are feathers scattered all around, torn flesh and snapped bone.

 

He won’t survive this. It’s even worse than his plummet after the Earth Shake. Even worse than the snap of his spine when Castiel had caught him around the waist and stopped the descent. It’s worse because there is only one decision now and it’s the exact one he didn’t want to make.

 

Castiel gathers what’s left of himself what hasn’t been infected and taken over by the Wolf his vessel has become and lifts free—doesn’t even hesitate as he wraps his hands into the ruined fabric clothing what had once been Jimmy Novak’s body and burned the life from it.

 

Benny’s face is scrunched up in something close to agony and the hand not holding pressure on Dean’s neck is pressed over the hunter’s eyes.

 

Castiel speaks and the world trembles.

 

“Dean…”

 

0-0-0

 

He doesn’t feel any different, which should be frightening, but maybe it’s just shock. It must be shock, waking up and seeing the body he had always associated with Castiel burned out on the ground—He’d screamed for a while but Benny had held him back politely chucked him over one shoulder and carried him a good distance away, sat him down on a rock next to a slowly rotting skeleton and pinned one of the hunter’s own hands to his chest spoke firmly in a voice that commanded obedience. A voice that reminded Dean of his father and froze the cries in his chest.

 

“He’s in here now! That body ain’t him—never was, understand?”

 

Dean nodded, shook all over and nodded again. He didn’t stop shaking as Benny went back to bury the body. He thought it was owed in all honesty, didn’t want anything eating it when humanity—even vampires—were so keen on the idea of the body being the person.

 

It was sad really, there would be no eventual ‘Digging Out’ as Benny had done a few times in his existence in Purgatory. There had been no soul in the body, nothing but the primal drive of the werewolf. Death and truly and fully visited that day and Benny thought he felt a chill in its wake.

 

Dean was still sitting there when he returned a few hours later, hunched forward with his limbs wrapped around his shoulders. He was still shaking, silent and unblinking. He didn’t shed a tear.

 

Benny sat with his back against a tree and held him all night.

 

Two days later they found the portal.

 

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	6. Uncertainty Breeds Deceit

Sam’s feet thunder on the dock and his voice feels caged in, choked against the falling snow. He shouts in alarm and skids on the frozen wood, falls to his hip and slithers to the edge of the dock , sees Dean floating a few feet away, face down. The water is disturbed around his body and the hilt of the knife is sticking up like a little buoy a few feet away.

Sam calls his brother’s name and grabs at him, feels his fingers ACHE in the cold water as he drags Dean closer and HEAVES him up onto the dock.

He’s pale, skin bluish and he doesn’t seem to be breathing.

Sam pushes him over onto his back, cursing under his breath, ears filled with a strange ringing noise. He can’t really feel his hands and the cold of the water splashed on his clothes BURNS his skin.

_Dean._

_DEAN WAKE UP!_

He shakes him, presses an ear to his chest and curses the cold and Dean’s infernal fucking LAYERS.

Sam slaps him, tries to rouse his brother, but nothing happens. He seems lost—Dead.

Yosef gets there first, yanks off his coat and shouts that they have to get him inside. Have to get him someplace and warm him up or he won’t make it, stab wound be damned.

Sam isn’t entirely aware of what happens after that. Somehow he gets Dean in a fireman’s carry and the next second he’s following Tallulah up the path toward the doctor’s house.

Dean doesn’t make a sound. Not one sound.

The kitchen is all stainless steel and white marble counter tops and Yosef knocks everything flying to clear a place for Dean, he shouts to Tallulah to get towels and bed sheets, anything they can use for bandaging and goes to the oven, turns it up on high and opens the door in an attempt to warm the space up, puts a big kettle of water on to boil and gets the door shut and locked behind Sam when he staggers in.

Sam is numb and it’s not entirely because of the wet cold leeching into him from Dean.

He gets his brother spread out face down on the counter top and feels a jag of horror shoot through him when he notices the knife is sticking out of Dean’s back again. He mutters a quick what the fuck and reaches for it but Yosef knocks his hands away, shouts again for Tallulah and yanks a pair of kitchen scissors out of a block of knives by the stove, goes to Dean and starts cutting his clothing off.

After a moment of staring stupidly Sam jerks into action, grabs a carving knife and lays Dean’s shirt and jacket open from the waist to the back of his neck carefully starts cutting toward the wound when he notices something—something that makes the chilled blood in his veins turn to fucking icewater.

The knife is moving. Sliding across Dean’s clothes like its got tiny little centipede legs instead of a blade.

Sam jerks back in surprise and watches with wide eyes and a slack jaw as the hilt moves again, flexes in toward Dean’s spine and back out toward his shoulder with every breath.

Yosef has noticed as well, says something rough sounding in Yiddish and shouts once more for ‘that damned woman!’

Tallulah comes into the room, arms laden with towels and sheets and a brief case sized first-aid kid slung by a strap over her shoulder. She sees the knife moving instantly and nearly drops everything, approaches cautiously with her dark eyes wide and shoves the towels and things into Yosef’s arms.

Somewhere in the background Sam hears Buck’s arrival. The door opens and shuts and the kid calls out to them, asks what’s going on and stares in horror when he gets to the kitchen.

Sam moves forward first, scared and yearning to do SOMETHING to keep his brother from bleeding to death he moves when the hilt moves, pushes Dean’s clothes farther and farther toward his shoulder until he can see the hilt moving over Dean’s very skin. Can count his breaths by how it slides, leaves smears and shallow scratches in Dean’s shoulder.

“What the hell is going on here,” Buck says in a whine of a voice.

Sam doesn’t know what to say and Yosef takes a step back, scissors still in his fist—and brandishes them at Sam and Dean;

“You tell us what’s going on right now—“

  
“I don’t know,” Sam says, tries to keep himself from screaming. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

Tallulah moves forward cautiously, deposits the first aid kit onto the counter by the sink and moves forward with her eyes narrowed; “I—I can see something. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it.”

“Feel it?” Sam says warily, nose wrinkled up.

She nods; “You learn enough about The Other Side, you pick up on these kinds of things. It’s not something you can see with your eyes, you have to look with everything you’ve got,” She lifts a hand and gingerly prods the hilt of the knife, jumps back when the motion of it stutters, pulls in toward Dean’s spine and Dean lets out a whine of a noise, like he’s been punched in the gut.

His eyes slide open, pupils blown and his lips are too pale. There is no Otherness in his gaze now, but Sam can feel it burning in his chest, has seen something ELSE living in his brother and he doesn’t know what the fuck it is.

“Sam,” Dean says, takes a shuddering breath and tries to draw in on himself, winces and swallows convulsively.

Sam takes a deep breath and lets it out; “I’m here, Dean. Just stay still.”

But Dean doesn’t stay still, his face scrunches up and his back arches. The noise he makes is inhuman, low and long and damned near agonized as he scratches toward the hilt of the blade where it slides and seems to float a little off the skin of his back; “Get—get it!” He says breathlessly; “Sam—SAM! Get it out! Oh, FUCK get it out! It BURNS!”

Sam wonders briefly if the blade hasn’t snapped off in Dean’s back, but the wound seems shallow, is bleeding but doesn’t seem to be bleeding enough for there to be six inches of bluish white metal stuck in him.

If anything there seems to be more blood appearing from nowhere, splattering and pooling on the countertop and the floor to Dean’s side than anything. It’s dark sticky and there—there are weird pieces of something in it—

Buck seems to notice it at the same time Sam does because the kid nudges the puddle with the toe of his boot and grips his rifle a little tighter as he looks up and meets Yosef’s eyes; “’s feathers.”

Yosef’s eyes snap to Sam and the point of his makeshift weapon goes to Dean; “Tallulah, what’s wrong with him? Can you fix it?”

Her hands lift, rub on her shirt front and the next second she’s got a switchblade in her hand and Sam can see symbols and sigils carved into the blade; “I don’t know, but I can sure as hell try.”

Sam moves, goes for her with both hands lifted but Yosef is in front of him, scissors pointed at Sam’s neck and suddenly Buck is there too, gun trained on Sam’s face.

“Now,” Yosef speaks softly, slowly; “I’ve held my peace with you two. I’ve accepted what you told us about his eyes, but that—“ He points to where Dean is still writhing weakly on the countertop; “—THAT is not right. It’s not natural, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it with or without you… I don’t want to hurt you, Sam, but if you try to stop us I will, without hesitation.”

Tallulah is humming now, fingers tracing over Dean’s shoulder blades and her eyes are rolled up to the whites, seem to glow a little; “I can feel something… Marks—a spell.”

Yosef’s eyes become cold; “Can you unmake it?”

Tallulah pushes Dean’s scratching hand away and traces across his wounded shoulder, her face curls up; “Yeah… Hold him down—“

Yosef nods to Buck; “Don’t let him move.”

The kid is shaking a little but he backs Sam up to the table and tells him to sit.

Sam doesn’t want to sit, but when the kid puts a round in the floor between Sam’s feet he doesn’t have a choice.

The sound is loud, too loud and the smell of gun powder is nigh overwhelming but Sam does as he’s told, tries not to hear Dean shouting his name.

“No—NO!” Dean says. He’s thrashing—blood is splattering from nowhere, and Yosef has pinned his arm down, is leaning across the small of his back to keep him still but Dean’s feet are kicking at air, face contorted and too fucking pale. “Please—Please, no!”

The knife hilt is in the air now, seems propelled by some otherworldly force, makes jerking up and down motions only to curl in close to Dean’s back again.

A wind gathers in the room as Tallulah hums and traces over the ‘spell’ on Dean’s back again, over and over from left to right. Her eyes seem to glow brighter and more terribly in her face and the words tattooed into her back and arms light up as well.

Sam watches Buck, waits for the kid to look away, for any chance to grab the gun and get these people away from his brother, but then it happens.

Tallulah gasps and slashes out with her knife, cuts a neat little four inch gash right through the checkmarks between Dean’s shoulder blades and Dean arches up with a noise like a howl.

The world explodes.

Tallulah is knocked back and Yosef goes flying out the kitchen door and into the hall with a loud curse.

Buck turns with a shocked yell and the gun goes off. Sam feels the sting of the bullet make a groove across his left bicep and he lunges at the kid, sends him sprawling with a fist to the chin and jerks the gun away, points it at Tallulah as she’s staggering to her feet and cocks it. Yells in the most commanding John Winchester voice he can to get the FUCK away from his brother and OUT of his sight!

Her eyes are wide, terrified—and locked on Dean.  
Sam doesn’t look, keeps the woman in his sights as he backs her toward the door where Yosef is just gaining his feet, points to the unconscious boy in the floor and tells them to take the fucking truck and get out of his sight!

Tallulah grabs Buck under the arms and drags him out into the hall, mumbles ‘Jesus, oh Jesus’ under her breath and Yosef is muttering in Yiddish again as he gathers the boy into his arms.

They don’t put up any argument, just leave, and Sam follows them to the door, fires two warning shots into the ground and isn’t a bit sorry as they run just that much faster toward the truck. He waits as long as he can, until they’ve climbed into the truck and he can see the tail lights as they pull away before he runs back into the kitchen for his brother.

Dean is pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, his whole body is trembling and the hanging light above his head is swaying side to side, popping and fizzing from the energy rolling off of Dean in waves.

Sam stands there in the doorway with his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide in horror because all he can see in that moment is something OTHER. Something NOT HUMAN wearing his brother’s face.

That is until Dean turns his head, green eyes dilated and watering in pain, face contorted and reaches back with one shaking hand to tangle in the bloody wet feathers around the hilt of the knife; “Help,” His voice is nothing but a hiss. He pulls and Sam can see a weak silvery light pouring out around the blade; “Jesus, Sam, help—Get this thing out—Get it out of me!”

Sam drops the gun and moves forward just as Dean sags forward onto his shoulder, lets out a moan and SHAKES all over.

Sam sees his brother then, wet and hurt and bleeding everywhere, but more than that he can see scars across Dean’s shoulders, silvery pink and shaped like archaic letters. Sees the four checkmarks cracked and seemingly burned at the edges from Tallulah’s cut. As if she’d broken some seal and let all the magic out.

Maybe she had. Who knew, all Sam knew, in that moment, was that Dean was hurting. He was hurting and he needed help.

Sam caught him before he could tumble off the counter, pressed one palm to his brother’s heaving chest and caught him around the waist with the other, spoke nonsense words in nonsense tones until he had Dean on his feet, practically dragged him to the table and put a chair under his rubbery legs, leaned Dean forward over a towel; “Don’t touch it,” Sam pushed his hand away from the knife, “Just hold still.”

He went to the stove for the hot water, brought over the kettle and a bowl, warmed a few clothes and began carefully wiping the blood away from Dean’s back, skirted the thick medial ends of—he tried not to think the word, tried to imagine them like arms, not w-wings, but his mind circled back to it every time.

Wings.

Unkempt, patchy, dirty wings about ten or eleven inches longer than Dean’s arms. Not nearly big enough to hold him in the air, but big enough to make Sam wonder exactly what the HELL had happened to his brother in purgatory.

_It changes you…_ He remembered Dean saying, _Sometimes you want it to, sometimes it just happens. Some stray thought, some fleeting idea and—bam. It takes you from behind._

Dean’s eyes were shut tight, his body shook uncontrollably and Sam pressed a dry towel to the wound his back, pressed down and focused on the hilt of the knife sticking out from between the feathers.

Sam took a deep breath; “Okay, how do I handle this?”

Dean breathed deep; “’out, get it out—I-I can’t take it—fuck—fucking BURNS!”

Sam nodded, shook out his hands and tried to get his heartbeat under control, tried to gentle his touch even as Dean turned his head and clamped his sharp teeth onto the towel under his face, went rigid all over and stifled a sob.

Sam could see it now, the length of the blade pushed clean through the flesh, right between the bones above what he supposed was technically the wrist joint of the wing, the appendage trembled weakly as Sam pushed a crumpled sheet against the underside, wrapped the loose ends over the top and grabbed the hilt, counted one-two—and pulled.

Dean gave a hard jerk and went absolutely limp, would have slid from his seat if Sam hadn’t put a hand on the back of his head to keep him in place.

He breathed carefully, in and out, tried not to think about the blood or feathers sticking to his fingers as he held pressure on the wounds. Counted backward from a hundred in his head then did it again until he felt steady enough to continue, fetched the first-aid kit and carefully peeled the sheet away, dabbed at the wound with the corner of a wet towel and splashed disinfectant over it. A pale blue light escaped from within the flesh and Sam remembered seeing something similar on Castiel.

He stared at the blade, shivered and wondered what kind of metal it was before he went about stitching the skin back together. Disinfected a third time and turned his chair to get to the underside of the wing.

It took the better part of an hour to get all three cuts cleaned and stitched, and another thirty minutes to bandage them and clean the blood away.

Dean barely made a noise. He flinched and the wings twitched, but other than that there was nothing.

Sweat beaded on Sam’s brow and he wrapped Dean up in the excess towels and blankets, sat there for a while just staring and shaking and trying to figure out what to do.

Was this even still his brother? Had it ever really been Dean? Or had it been something else, something INHUMAN wearing Dean’s face.

What the hell was Sam supposed to do now?

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	7. One and the Same

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The vomiting came first. Which, looking back on it, should have been the only clue Sam needed that something was wrong. 

He’d had the kitchen warm, had started making calls, trying to find someone—anyone who could help, or had information on what could have happened to Dean to do THIS to him. He’d found Garth and a woman named Judith who answered one of Joe Ingle’s old numbers. Judith was from Idaho, she was seventy-six and her granddaughter had bought this phone for her, so how did Sam get her number? 

Garth was much more forgiving, he chuckled merrily when he recognized Sam’s voice, and then lowered his voice seriously when Sam mentioned that Dean was in a bad way and they needed help. 

“Don’t you worry!” Garth said. “I’m in Minnesota right now but I can meet you anywhere you need.”

Sam had opened his mouth to offer thanks when Dean had made an awful choking noise and started coughing up bile. 

He’d had to practically throw the phone to get to his brother fast enough to keep him from inhaling his own sick. 

He stilled again afterward, and Sam cleaned up the mess, swiped Dean’s face with a wet cloth and started wiping the kitchen free of their fingerprints and splashing diluted laundry detergent and peroxide over the blood splatters. Readying the place to abandon and head off to meet Garth in Montana. 

But when Sam tried to rouse Dean, he wouldn’t wake up. He wouldn’t wake up when Sam said his name loudly or tugged his hair or pulled him up against his chest and smacked his cheeks. And the heat—

Dean had run warm since his return from Purgatory, but this was abnormal. Too hot—

Fever. 

Sam peeled back the bandages on Dean’s back and wing—there, he said it without flinching this time—and found the skin around each wound reddened and blistering, that same blueish white light peeking out between the stitches.

“What the hell?” Sam’s hand lifted and hovered over the wound—

Dean’s eyes popped open and he sucked in a breath like a storm gale and Sam could feel the power surge up in him—not just the normal otherworldly strength he’d become used to in the last year, but MORE. He came to his feet chair skidding back across the room, chair rebounding off the wall in front of him like a hockey puck. 

His eyes were still green, but they weren’t Dean’s eyes anymore. The person—or THING looking out of them wasn’t Dean anymore. 

He screamed. 

The lights in the kitchen burned bright—the ground shook, windows rattled and the very air of the room vibrated. Sam went to his knees with a shout, hands over his ears, the sound piercing his head like an ice pick. 

It seemed to go on forever, a never ending supersonic SCREECH— the sickly feathers stood on end—a few shook themselves free and hit the ground like cinders. The next second Dean’s hand slapped up over his own mouth, even as the cry continued and he turned, met Sam’s gaze in horror and bowed in on himself, choking the noise out with the curl of his body as he sank down over his knees. He sat there panting, trembling—sweat rolling off him in waves. Eyes feverish bright. 

“Help,” His voice was shredded, a dry rasp of a thing and the person that turned back to Sam was at once Dean and not. “Help me, please.” 

Sam’s hands lifted slowly—fearfully, away from his ears and he stared in shock and revulsion. “Who are you! What are you!”

The Dean in his brother’s face crumbled, hiccupped on a sob—the other met his stare evenly, pained and urgent and fearful. “They’ll come for me—They’ll rip him apart to take me back! Sam—Sam, HELP ME! I can’t do this!”

And Sam knew. Felt it in his bones as surely as he knew his own name. “Cas?”

“We have to leave. Now!”

Sam pushed himself up the wall, creeping with his palms flat against the wainscot until he was upright, disbelief pulling his features long and hollow; “What—Cas, what are you doing in my brother!”

Castiel’s expressions on Dean’s face looked slightly absurd, but even more disturbing was the fact that he could see Dean there too—writhing in agony just beneath the surface, like transparent images overlapping. 

“Jesus, Cas! What happened! I thought you were dead!”

He pulled Dean’s lips back from his teeth; “LISTEN TO ME! We have to leave! NOW!” He shuddered, pushed Dean’s body to its feet and staggered into the kitchen island. Snatched up the damned weird knife and turned on Sam with a whimper; “They’re coming!”

Sam pushed away from the wall, eyes wide—nodded then nodded again and grabbed up the bag he’d packed to help care for Dean’s injury. “Yeah—yeah, OK.” 

Castiel stumbled into the walls on his way to the door but remained upright, Dean’s injured wing sagging behind him, the other folded in close. 

The snow was blowing wildly—blinding whiteness as far as Sam could see. “Are you going to zap us someplace? The car is—“

Dean’s body buckled and spat more sick into the snow. Sam paused, squinting against the wind and pulled him up, shouted to be heard above the growing screech and howl of snow rushing through the air; “How are we getting out of here, I can’t drive in this!”

Dean’s body straightened eyes tired—then focused on something over Sam’s shoulder—

The next second Sam was face down in a drift and when he rolled upright hand going for the gun at the back of his trousers he saw Dean’s body mid spring—And a strange man in a suit swinging a blade at him. 

Angel. 

Castiel hadn’t been exaggerating. 

Then there was another—and another.

Sam surged to his feet, fired one-two-three shots into one suit, turned and saw Cas swing Dean’s fist, still clutching that weird knife in a wide arc, scoring a line across a brunette female angel’s sword arm.

She screamed and the wound sizzled—blackened and spewed a gob of bluewhite light. She jerked backward and away with a thunderclap of wings clutching her arm. Her blade dropped and Dean’s hand shot out, caught it before it hit the earth— Castiel pivoted on Dean’s feet, stolen blade in one hand, knife held in a reverse grip in the other, he twisted Dean’s face into something feral and bloodthirsty the likes of which Sam had never seen. 

The third angel, poised between Sam and Castiel rolled his lips back from his teeth; “You would sully yourself with such a thing as that? You could have taken any vessel but you chose this twisted THING—”

Castiel didn’t hesitate, threw the stolen blade into the angel’s chest, knocking it back into the snow with a screech and a flashburn of wings in ice.

The next second the angel Sam had shot lunged forward, wrapping a thick arm—unyielding like steel around his throat. Sam gagged and his gun went flying from his hands off into the snow and vanished. 

Sam felt the electric chill of an angel blade press into the flesh below his right nipple and his hands tightened into fists.

“Brother—“ It was so strange hearing it in Dean’s voice.

“You are not my brother,” The angel snarled, body burning hot with righteous rage; “You chose these abominations over your own—over Heaven!”

It was kind of hypnotic watching Castiel move in Dean’s body. There was Castiel’s sneer, the squint of his eyes, the twitch of his jaw and twirl of a second stolen angel blade in his hand. But there was something wrong with him, something off kilter— Sam saw it in the way the snow and wind caught at the broken feathers on Dean’s wings, melted against the bare skin of his back and chest. Saw it in the grace bleeding liquid out of the wounds on Dean’s back. “Sam Winchester has no part in this! Let him go!”

“I’ll gut him first.” 

Sam’s eyes widened. 

Castiel froze, Dean’s eyes flicked to Sam’s and with a sigh he pitched the knife into the drift he’d thrown Sam into moments before. 

“Now… On your knees. Accept your fate, don’t soil your memory further by resisting the will of Heaven.”

Sam twisted, felt his heart hammering in his chest. 

Castiel didn’t move.

“Kneel and I’ll kill this one quickly.” 

“Zaphiel—“

The angel clamped his free hand on Sam’s throat—squeezed his trachea until Sam felt it start to give—

Dean’s knees hit the snow, angel blade clattering away. The movement was jerky—unangelic and Sam saw the struggle across Dean’s face—his brother and Castiel fighting for control. His eyes flicked skyward. Dean’s eyes seemed to blaze brightly for a moment, then blanked and Castiel stilled, resigned, head dropping forward in defeat. 

Zaphiel sighed, satisfied; “That was the smart thing to do,” The next second Sam was forced to his knees in the snow and the angel shoved his blade to the hilt through Sam’s right thigh—piercing through his calf and shin and five inches into the concrete pathway beneath him. 

The pain was unlike anything Sam had felt since the cage. For half an instant he could do nothing but stare at it—the next it felt like his throat was cracking open, his voice raised high in pain, swallowed by the snow, and the world around him was a blur of motion. 

Dean’s body rocked up and back, foot lifting—stomping down on the hilt of the angel blade, launching it upward and into his hand. And something large—too large—and dressed in black swooped down from the roof of the house, landed on the other angel’s back and forced it to the ground. 

Sam heard a hiss— the vibrating hum of a blade singing through the air, and the next second there was a splash of red in the snow and the violent flash of a second dying angel.

The stranger shifted and pushed slowly to his feet, looked Dean’s body up and down and turned a pale, bearded face to Sam, jagged sharp fangs slipping back into hiding between his lips. 

Vampire. 

VampirevampirevampireVAMPIRE!

Sam’s hands shook—his whole body shook. The cold was seeping into him from all around and his leg—CHRIST HIS LEG! He bowed his head, tried to force himself to breathe calmly—in and out, in and out—But—

VAMPIREVAMPIREVAMPIREVAMPIRE!

“Sam!” Dean’s body was kneeling in front of him, hands too warm against Sam’s face, “Sam, look at me!” Castiel’s words through Dean’s voice were urgent. “I believe can heal this, but I know I can’t heal Dean… LOOK AT ME!” He gave Sam’s shoulders a rough shake; “The blade—the blade the witch stabbed us with, it’s a piece of an angel’s blade reforged in hellfire.”

Sam’s mind conjured images of hellfire—a living flame that ignored tinder, cloth and flesh and fed on souls and grace. Burned and burned and burned but never seemed to consume all of you, just wormed its way deeper until you became part of it.

Dean’s face was so pale now, Castiel’s words weak, “The blade pierced us both. As long as I stay with Dean he’ll get worse,” He shuddered, “I can heal you to the best of my abilities, but you have to trust me.”

Sam looked up at him, eyes wide, dilated and dimming from shock. “What? Cas—the vampire. There’s a vampire—”

“The longer I stay the more it hurts him! If I go I’ll take the fire with me and he will heal! I have a plan… Meet me in Stull Cemetery in nine days.”

“The vampire—oh, god my leg—Cas! The-the v-vampire!”

Said vampire had stalked close and was bending over them, wrapped one hand around the hilt of the blade protruding from Sam’s thigh—and with a mighty heave, wrenched it free.

Sam heard a scream, felt it crack in his own throat like a broken window, and the next second everything was gone.

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	8. Judas Iscariot

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The first thing Sam became aware of, other than his own return to consciousness, was that he was moving laterally through space, though somehow was lying in a bed. It wasn’t comfortable, and didn’t smell sterile enough to be a hospital, so his next observation was that he was alive, but not in the Impala. 

The wind was whistling and though he felt more-or-less warm, the air on his face was cold. His leg ached like it had been broken in more than one place, and when he pried his eyes open he found himself in a small enclosed space about four feet tall, five feet wide, and a few inches longer than he was tall. 

Dean was beside him, lying on his stomach wings bound to his back with a tortilla wrap of blankets. He was shivering almost convulsively, face pale save patches of red high on his cheeks. Asleep or unconscious Sam didn’t know, he didn’t seem to have the strength to speak. Either way, Dean looked like shit. You know the type. 

Something rattled loudly beyond Sam’s feet, outside what he was quickly beginning to realize was the bed of a truck. 

It wasn't a surprise, he'd woken up in stranger places, but it wasn't something he was happy about, being alive notwithstanding. He was in the back of a truck with cardboard taped over the windows and a small, bare light bulb in a socket above his and Dean’s heads. 

Sam’s mouth was dry, he needed a drink—

The vampire. FUCK! Sam groped at Dean’s neck, then both sides of his own but found no bite wounds, none on his arms and when he moved to check his legs he found the right was wrapped tightly in plastic cling film from his crotch to his ankle and splinted with what looked like broom handles. 

He lifted a hand and prodded his thigh gingerly, found the wound easily, but it didn’t hurt as badly as it should have. Castiel must have at least half healed him before his juice ran too low. Thank Cas for small miracles, maybe Sam wouldn't bleed to death before he figured out where the hell the vampire was taking them and why. 

Cas.

Holy SHIT! 

Sam ground his teeth and forced himself up to his elbows, noticed a torn corner of the cardboard taping up the back glass and spied the snow covered highway behind them, interrupted by the blackness of the Impala on one of those two-wheeled car transporters. She looked lonely and cold in the wind with no one at the wheel. Eerie and still despite the slight side to side motion of her in the blistering wind. 

Okay, vampire who decided to not only kidnap them, but steal Dean's car too. This was a first. Usually they bit first and asked questions never.

If he was in the back of a truck, why was it so warm? Sam pawed at the blanket covering him discovered an electric cord running to a car battery rigged up to a standard power outlet bolted to the bed of the truck near where Dean's elbow should be. 

“Dean,” He hissed, took Dean’s nearest hand and shook it; “Dean, wake up!”

Dean mumbled incoherently and his eyebrows lifted, but then he was still again. 

Sam didn’t like it. Not at all. 

He heard the truck downshift just as he was contemplating tearing the cardboard from the windows and trying to flag down help, fumbled in his pockets for anything he could use as a weapon—And discovered he still had his pocket knife, his cell phone, his wallet, and the envelope of cold pills he’d been taking since Tuesday. 

He tried his phone, expecting it to be dead or broken—and was surprised when it was in working order but had no service. 

The truck turned off the road and up a slight incline. Sam caught sight of a snowplow heading back onto the highway through the gap in the cardboard, it had Montana plates. He blinked in confusion. 

Montana? The vampire kidnapped them and inadvertently took them in the direction they needed to go? He stuffed his phone back in his pocket and pulled out his knife as the truck pulled to a stop. He could smell the diffused stench of exhaust and gasoline and an old wood burning stove and the next moment he heard the clack of the truck’s sliding rear window opening a the cardboard shoved itself up a face appearing in the gap. 

“Friend,” The vampire said conversationally; “You have change for a ‘hundred? They tend to frown on unusual looking folks with big bills.” 

Sam thrust his knife at the vampire’s face but he just dodged back with a sigh and caught Sam's wrist. He could easily have squeezed and broken it but instead he just held on. “Sam, right?”

Sam snarled.

“My name’s Benny, I'm a friend of your brother's, and I’m not gonna hurt you.”

“Like hell! Where are you taking us?”

“Whitefish, just like the angel told me to. He said you had a doctor meeting you there.”

Sam didn't think an ex-dentist counted as a DOCTOR, suffix or not. He twisted the grip of his knife in his fist and aimed the blade at the vampire’s wrist but he, BENNY, simply gave his arm a hard turn backward and took it. Folded the blade and released him. 

Sam reached for him again, fingers curled into claws. “If I start screaming the cops will be all over you—“

Benny peered at him over the lenses of his sunglasses; “Why scream, you got a phone? Look, if I was gonna hurt you why would I have bothered to pull that car of Dean’s outta the snow? It was an inconvenience not to mention cold— And what the hell are you two doin’ out in a goddamn blizzard with a rear-wheel-drive? ‘slike you wanna crash and burn,” He turned and placed Sam’s knife on his dashboard. Swatted at his clawing hand like it was an annoying fly. "Dean told me you had a temper, but I wasn't expecting this... You gonna keep tryin to scratch my eyes out? Or can we talk like civilized people."

Sam blinked slowly—opened his mouth to start screaming;

Benny rolled his eyes, “Would it make you feel better if I gave you your knife back?”

“It’d make me feel better if you were dead!”

Benny snorted, “You really are a drama queen,” Instead of giving Sam back his knife he handed over a cell phone; “Go ahead and call the police if you wan’ta, try to explain to them why your brother’s got wings. In the mean time, try not to bleed all over the place back there, it's distracting.”

Sam worked his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He took the phone violently and waited until the vampire had climbed out and was filling the tank before he dialed Jody’s number and pressed the device to his ear. His vision was already swimming, and a quick inspection of the plastic wrapped around his leg showed smears of red against the thick white bands of torn bedsheets. He forced himself to breathe, chanted in his head that staying calm was his only option. Trying to fight with the damned vampire would only make him bleed, which would make the vampire crazy. Fuck it all, he was lying here in a vampire's bed bleeding. He needed to calm down, needed to breathe... needed to find help. 

Jody answered on the second ring. Sam spoke quickly, quietly, hoping it was low enough that the vampire couldn't hear it over the howl of the wind and the chug of gasoline into his truck. "It's Sam. We're in trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

Sam swallowed nervously, leaned his shoulder against the side of the truck and fought back shivers; "Dean's hurt pretty bad and I'm not in much better shape."

"Where are you?" She stood from her desk and shut the office door, pitched her voice low. "Are you OK?"

"No... We're kind of kidnapped."

"'Kind of kidnapped'? How can you be 'kind of kidnapped'?"

"Angels attacked us-" He left out the part about Castiel and the witches, "-Dean was stabbed in the back, one of them got me in the leg... then this vampire swooped in out of fucking nowhere and kidnapped us. He said he's taking us to Whitefish."

"Jesus. Is Dean OK? How bad is it? He said he’s taking you to Whitefish?”

“To meet Garth.”

“Well, I can be there before Garth is. How bad off are you two, really?”

Sam was starting to shiver again, begrudgingly pulled the heated blanket back up over his shoulders and trained his eyes on Dean, ensuring himself that his brother was breathing. “My right leg’s a mess… And Dean's back— look, stuff happened, I can’t explain it over the phone, just—just be prepared for bad.”

“Sam, you boys need to go to a hospital… Just bust out a window in that truck and flag down some help! Think of your brother! He took a f-frickin knife to the back! This is serious!”

“Jody, Dean’s not—he can’t go to a hospital like this.”

“Why the hell not! Did he sprout a second head or something? Emergency rooms can handle more weird than you think they can— It could be BAD, Sam! He needs a doctor!“

Sam’s stomach bubbled; “Not this.”

“Sam… Sam, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong with him? Is he OK? H-he's not... is he?”

“No. He's alive, I just... I can’t tell you over the phone. Just know that it’s bad, but he can’t go to a hospital.”

She inhaled deeply and let it out. “Okay. Okay, I’m on my way, prepared for severed limbs and second heads. At least tell me it's not a spinal cord thing, or anything vital. I don't care how weird things got, if it's something vital I will skin you myself!”

“Just hurry.”

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“If you don’t call me back in an hour with an update I’m calling in favors and putting out an APB on this guy. Hell, text if you have to keep it quiet, but this not telling me how bad it is business is bullshit!" She inhaled deeply and let it out with a shudder. "If this guy starts acting fishy while you've got the phone, send me a code word, OK?"

“I’ll mention something biblical.” 

“Not angels, that could be confusing.”

“Okay.” 

Sam peeled up a bit of cardboard from the window at his side and peered out at the gas station. Found it kitschy and crusted with ice and snow. 

Benny was exiting the establishment with a paper sac hugged to his chest. He nodded to a woman in a parka rushing from her Dodge into the store and popped open the truck’s door, turned in his seat and flipped up the cardboard again; “He awake yet?”

Sam clenched his jaw and refused to speak. 

Benny grunted, not in the least bit surprised, and passed the paper bag back through the window. “I can be stubborn too you know. But at least I have the decency to save it for when it’s deserved,” The bag thumped down on the mattress between Sam and Dean and spilled out a package of trail mix, beef jerky, some run-of-the-mill pain killers, and a bottle of orange juice. “Consider it a peace offering,” Benny said and snapped the rear window closed. 

Sam waited until the truck had turned and was on the highway again then leaned to the left and tried to rouse Dean once more. Rubbed sweat from his brother’s face and gave his hand a tight squeeze. “Come on, Dean. Please—PLEASE! I need you man, we're in trouble.” 

He grunted and one eye cracked open, dim and bleary. He peered out at Sam with all the comprehension of a newborn. 

Sam almost wept; “Oh, thank fuck! Dean, come on, man, we’ve been kidnapped by a goddamn vampire, I need your help!”

Dean blinked his other eye open and shifted his cheek against the mattress, stretched his eyebrows toward his hairline and peered up at the cardboard taped to the windows. Slowly Sam began to see signs of the gears beginning to spin in his brother’s mind once more. Saw the effort it took and wondered, dazedly, how much of Dean’s weirdly rapid healing over the past year had been Castiel’s doing. 

“Dean—Come on, stay awake,” He scuffed his fingers through Dean’s hair when his brother's eyes sagged and lost focus, found his skin painfully hot to the touch and started carefully trying to unwrap him. “Hey, it’s OK, you’re just a little too hot, let me help.” 

Dean said nothing, let his head sag back against the mattress, eyes blinking slowly, flicking back and forth as if trying to figure out where he was. 

“Jeez,” Sam got three blankets peeled down and found the fourth and fifth drenched in sweat. “Can you even understand what I’m saying right now?”

Dean shuddered and swiped his tongue over his lips; “Yeah,” There was no sound behind it, just a breath shaped like a word. 

Sam inhaled and lowered his voice, tried to take the urgency out of his tone because now that Dean was awake Sam realized his brother was in no shape to lend anything to the situation. “We got picked up by a vampire.”

“Vamp’r?” Dean’s tongue didn’t want to move.

“Yeah, he says his name’s Benny. He took my knife, but I’ve got a—“

Dean’s eyes snapped to focus on his brother’s face, “Benny?”

Sam’s heart thudded in his chest. 

Oh. 

Oh, shit. 

The vampire hadn't lied.

“You—you know him?” Sam said, tried like hell to keep the anger and betrayal out of his voice.

Dean’s mouth compressed and with a sigh he nodded; “’s a long… long story.”

Sam ground his teeth; “I think we’ve got a long ride ahead of us, so tell me, Dean. How you—YOU, became friends with a vampire.”

Dean shuddered, eyes lifting to Sam’s face in apology and with a tired sigh, he started talking. “I don’t—I don’t know how to describe it, Sammy. I—It was Purgatory, OK? H-heaven for monsters— I was a human in monster heaven… I didn't stand a chance.”

"You made it out."

"And LOOK at me!" His eyes caught the light, shone blue and red like a cat's and he dragged one wing up enough to flop over the edge of the blanket. "I'm— Just LOOK at me!"

Sam did, for as long as he could, then turned his eyes away, ashamed of himself. "Dean—"

"I wouldn't be here if it weren't for him, I'd still be there and there wouldn't be anything of me left!" His breath hitched, sharp teeth bared as a spasm shot through him He turned his face away. "I don't know what I am anymore, Sam. But I know I'm not a monster, and it's because of him and Cas." 

Sam turned his face into the corner, teeth pinching his tongue until he tasted blood. Dean didn't say anything else, and when Sam turned his head the limp loll of Dean's head and uninjured wing with the motion of the truck was enough of a hint to tell Sam that the conversation had been too much. "Dean?"

No answer.

Sam pushed two fingers into the side of Dean's neck, found his pulse beating quickly, the heat of his skin unbelievable. He cursed under his breath and pushed himself up again, tugged at the sweat slick blankets and pushed them away, grunted and ground his teeth at the tearing pain in his leg and drew Dean close. His fingers hovered, fearful for a moment, then brushed against the upward sweep of one bent feather, watched it shift and the skin of Dean's back and arms prickle with gooseflesh. 

Jesus, this was real. As if stitching it up and bandaging it hadn't been enough to drive that point home. 

"Oh, God, Dean," Sam's voice cracked and before he knew what was happening his eyes were flooded and he was stroking the width of his palm through his brother's hair, fear and sorrow and shame etched into his face. He tugged the electric blanket over them both and spent a long while just feeling Dean's back rising and falling with breath. Reassuring himself that Dean was alive— everything else was secondary. 

Dazed and cried out, almost an hour later Sam remembered his promise to Jody and plucked up the phone the vampire— Benny, had given him.

She answered on the first wring. "Sam?"

"Hey," He snuffed, "We're OK."

"Did you get away from it?"

"No."

"Did— Are you safe?"

"Yeah, I hope so."

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0


End file.
